


Whispers

by Deannie



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Post-Avengers, Pre-Iron Man III, This was started a very long time ago
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-03 12:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19463707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deannie/pseuds/Deannie
Summary: An apparent meteorite strike turns out to be anything but, and Tony and Steve must come to a meeting of the minds to prevent a tragedy.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [red_b_rackham](https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_b_rackham/gifts), [natlyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/natlyn/gifts).



> This was begun back in 2014. Yes, friends, a long, long time ago. Natlyn and Bess might remember it, or not, but I credit them with it being good (if it's good in your estimation) and blame only myself if you don't find it to your liking. I found it on my hard drive and decided to finish it. Because I think it's a good yarn!
> 
> I've retrofit it slightly, taking into account things we've learned over the last five years and however many movies, but I did try to keep the feel of the initial relationship (meaning Tony: I hate Captain America for being Dad's obsession and Steve: Your father was kind of an ass sometimes, but you can be so much worse, can't you? But also Both: You don't totally suck and we can work together, huh?) as I read it at the time.
> 
> The story is complete and will be posted as I get a chance to clean up the formatting.

Agent Hill called Tony Stark just five weeks after Thor blew town with his brother and the Tesseract. Tony hadn't really left Stark Tower since he finished his debriefing, spending most of his waking hours—which were most of the hours in a day—working on how best to respond to the knowledge gained in the wake of what was being called by the media The Battle of New York. Tony was inclined to call it a bad dream, or possibly a bad trip. Either way, it was definitely the reason he didn't sleep anymore.

He'd paid a huge sum of money to buy up the mostly destroyed area around Stark Tower and was slowly proceeding with plans to create a center that would house the new headquarters for Stark Industries—Pepper being on the other side of the continent running the company was getting seriously old. The tower itself would, of course be used for a better purpose. The Avengers needed a home base, after all—to address threats just like the one Hill was calling about.

There’d been a supposed meteorite strike in Pennsylvania the night before, though anyone with eyes would’ve known it was anything but. The views from the news helicopters—before crews were banned from the area “because of concerns about possible radiation,” of course—showed a perfect, small crater. It hadn’t accidentally hit Earth as it hurtled through space. It was guided in—or at the very least it was dropped from near-Earth orbit.

Tony was rapidly developing a hatred for anything alien. The stupid "meteorite" included. Extraterrestrial threats were going to have to be assessed quickly and thoroughly, and while the idea of actually leaving his safe, secure building  _ vaguely _ made him want to throw up, he knew he’d check this out if they asked him to.

Didn't mean he had to make it easy on them, though.

“Mr. Stark,” Hill said, oozing efficiency. “Director Fury would like to request your help with a situation.”

“Something fell out of the sky again, didn’t it?” he asked flippantly.

Hill didn’t say anything, because she knew he knew, and unlike most people, she didn’t bother with niceties. He'd always liked that about her.

Tony didn’t look up at her image on the video call. He was too busy looking at the schematics of the tower. Well, he was actually multitasking. Regardless, though, Pepper was right. The bar was in completely the wrong place in the original penthouse. Over by that wall was much better. Why wasn't Bruce already working on that space rock? 

"What about Banner?" 

Did they want a liquor chiller? He did like a cold martini... Where would they put it, though? He knew they hadn’t called Bruce, because Bruce hadn’t asked for a ride—or for Tony to take his place or babysit his experiments or any of the other things Bruce would have done if they’d asked him. Tony wanted to know why.

"This was deemed too volatile for Dr. Banner." Volatile, huh? Yeah, hulking out didn't really advance the cause of science. Tony glanced up at Hill’s video call as data began popping up around her face. She was trying to lure him in, and he let her do it. Kept her in practice.

Definitely wasn't a meteorite—didn't even look like one. It was too round, too… constructed. It was encased in a black, hardened shell, but through the cracks glowed a soft greenish glow. His palms started sweating, but his fingers itched to touch the monitor and find out more.

“Mr. Stark, please,” Hill said, more ordering than asking. “We need an expert on alien technology.” He glanced at her image briefly and was impressed with her little moue of distaste. “Right now, I’m afraid that means you.”

“When did I become an expert on alien technology?” he deadpanned, absolutely not looking at the clear and predictable peaks and valleys of gamma, X-Ray, and delta radiation that showed on the energy output graph. Tiny amounts, nothing to worry about in the grand scheme of things, but regular and steady. He wondered what those random spikes were in the visual and audio ranges, though. Didn’t seem regular at all—were they caused by an external stimulus?

He really hated alien things.

“Last month in Manhattan,” Hill told him, in response to his earlier query.

What was it coated in? Whatever it was, the covering hadn’t survived atmospheric entry well.

“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Guide one nuclear missile through a wormhole—” 

He suddenly fought to breathe as his heart raced.

“We need you, Mr. Stark,” she continued, dimly heard but relentless over the buzzing in his ears. “The device has already shown itself to be dangerous.”

Tony snapped out of it quickly, shaking his head. Those episodes really had to stop. Dr. Richardson had told him there was no permanent damage from the radiation he’d absorbed up there. He wasn’t one to trust doctors, but Richardson seemed to know what he was talking about.

The monitor suddenly brought up a video feed. A young man wearing surgical scrubs—surfer-type, long shaggy blond hair, built—lay on a bed in a hospital room. His blue eyes were open and completely vacant. “This is Guppy Farrar.”

“Guppy?” Tony asked, pretending he really didn’t care about whatever gave the kid that dead-eyed look. “Who’s named Guppy?”

“Farrar was the one to report the meteorite,” Hill continued quietly. “He and a friend discovered it and called it in. According to his friend, he just touched the meteorite, screamed, and collapsed. Other than first and second degree burns on the arm that he used to touch it, he’s physically unhurt.”

“Gorked,” Tony guessed, looking at the dull, lifeless eyes. A brain-sucking space rock?

At her silence, he looked up at Hill. She was watching the video, too. Waiting for—

“DON’T TOUCH!”

Farrar’s terrified bellow was followed up by a hard shove at the nurse who had dared to come too close. There was no emotion in his face. No fire in his eyes. Just a scream both scared and furious.

“Okay,” Tony said, eyebrows rising in surprise. “Not gorked.”

“That’s the only type of response that they can raise from him,” Hill told him. “His friend is completely unhurt and shows no sign of being exposed to any of the radiation Farrar absorbed.”

“What do his brain waves look like?” Tony wondered. He hadn’t even realized he’d said it out loud until the EEG results appeared before him. The blueprints on the table were quickly forgotten. He didn't know much about neurology, but he knew enough to know _that_ was all kinds of wrong.

“How is he even breathing?” he asked, staring at the flat lines with regular but minimal spikes. They weren’t frequent enough to correlate to breathing… An MRI came up, and while it showed  _ some _ activity, it didn’t seem like enough to keep a person alive. Radiation levels were miniscule now. The attached graph showed that they’d been high enough initially that Farrar’s buddy should have taken a good hit...

Tony gripped the table to keep his hands from shaking. Damn it. Now he really had to see this thing. He really didn’t want to. He looked back at the blank face of the surfer.

Crap.

“Who else does Fury have on it?” he asked, bowing to the inevitable.

Pepper wasn’t going to like this—she’d pretty much wanted to kill him all over again when she got to DC after the team had been dragged to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters to debrief. Which wasn’t really fair—he had  _ tried _ to call. Sometimes it sucked being engaged. You couldn’t just go jetting off, hunting down alien… Tony reined in his thoughts, stilling his shaking hand.  _ Not the time. _

“Captain Rogers is en route from DC.” Huh. Since when was  _ Captain America _ an alien technology expert, either? Though he had been pretty good at taking the stuff down, hadn’t he? And he was naturally radiation-resistant...

“Tell Rogers I’ll meet him in—“ he glanced at the map she’d sent along— “Pickory, Pennsylvania. Really? That’s a place? I’ll meet him there in three hours.”

“He’ll be here in two.”

Tony looked up at the smirk he knew she had on her face. “Okay, now you’re just pushing it.” He’d call Pepper on the way.

> _ “Sir, shall I try Miss Potts?" _
> 
> _ "Might as well." _

He took a deep breath and pushed it away. He’d eventually be able to get through a day without a flashback, right?

“Fine. Two hours.” He signed off before she could say goodbye. “Jarvis!” he called, balling his hands into fists at an irrational spike of dread. “How about we take a little ride?”

“The Mark VII has only just been repaired—“ the AI tried to counsel him.

“Yeah, well, it would've been nice to have the paint job done, but everything works, right? Let's go. Come on.”

He walked out to what was left of the balcony, clapping his hands together nervously at being so exposed, relaxing only when the suit shot up from the floor below to meet him and wrapped itself comfortably around his body. Shielding him. He could do this.

“Where are we off to, sir?” Jarvis asked laconically. AI with an attitude. What was Tony thinking when he did that? Remembering the man—so much more than just a  _ butler _ —who’d tried to keep him in line for the first twenty-three years of his life, he smiled.  _ That _ was what he’d been thinking.

“Pickory, Pennsylvania,” he said, stepping boldly off the building. “And let’s make it snappy—we don’t want Captain America making us look bad.”

He took to the air, gunning the jets for all they were worth, and tried not to notice how much better he felt encased in nickel-titanium alloy.

* * * * * * * *

The motorcycle’s wheels ate up the asphalt, the machine itself rumbling smoothly beneath him. Steve liked the twenty-first century countryside better than the cities, somehow. Things seemed less different.

He supposed New York wasn’t really all  _ that _ different—or hadn’t been before last month—but the people were. Though remembering the number of times he’d been beaten bloody on those streets seventy years ago, maybe the people hadn’t changed at all. Maybe it was just him.

He hadn’t wanted to answer the call when Maria Hill contacted him. Fury had invited him to join S.H.I.E.L.D. officially during the whole fiasco with Loki, but Steve wasn’t sure he fit in there—honestly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. 

As bloody as modern “peace time” seemed to be, though, the regular army didn’t really have a place for a man like him, and he didn’t think going back to his eighty-year-old dream of being the next Norman Rockwell was a viable option. He had a surprising nestegg, leftover from his apartment and savings in 1945 (apparently Howard, at least, had never given up hope that he’d be found, and Stark was nothing if not good at investing in the future). He could live off his savings for as long as he wanted, he supposed. Idle wealth wasn’t really his style, though. 

No, he needed to be useful, and S.H.I.E.L.D. was that. But he didn’t trust Nick Fury. He didn’t really trust anyone in this time. 

Of course anything alien was to be trusted even less, and for this, he could put aside his problems with Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. and all the rest of it. From what Maria had sent him, the strange sphere didn’t look like the Tesseract or Chitauri tech, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t equally as deadly.

So he’d hopped on his new bike and headed out. Pickory, Pennsylvania had a population of roughly 7000, but they were spread out across miles of countryside. If an alien device with undetermined motives had to crash down, this wasn’t a bad place for it.

Steve pulled his motorcycle to a stop beside the NASA portable research lab, unsurprised when Agent Hill stepped out and greeted him. NASA had little to do with this, beyond lending their name to the cover story. Hill was one of the agents he’d met that he felt he could read. She didn’t seem to have much of her own agenda. She was a solid agent doing her job well. He might not trust her, but he did respect her.

“Hey Maria.” Steve looked out at the empty field, surprised by the stillness. “I would’ve thought Fury would have the place crawling with scientists by now.”

Maria gave him a nervous look and Steve straightened on his bike. Funny. She’d never seemed like the nervous type.

“Something wrong?” he asked, shutting off the engine. Almost immediately, he heard it.

Static or... whispers... He looked around, locating the source of the sound, unsurprised when it proved to be the meteorite.

“Has it been doing that the whole time?” he asked, standing away from the motorcycle and moving toward the rock in the field.

Maria seemed to deflate. “What do  _ you _ get?”

“What?” The question didn’t seem to make sense.

“Pladin heard music, Young was seeing ‘flashing lights’, and Harrison tried to take on half the staff and had to be restrained.” She was watching him a little too nervously as she said that last.

Steve stared at her for a moment, then looked at what little of the device stuck up from inside the crater—really looked at it and tried to get an idea of what he was hearing. It wasn’t talking to  _ him _ , exactly. More like a conversation heard from afar. And it felt… something under his skin buzzed because of it….

“I’m not sure,” he finally murmured, reviewing his initial thoughts. He was disturbed to find himself drawn to the glowing meteorite. “Whispers.”

Maria stepped forward, looking at the crater as well. “Words?”

“No.” He listened, trying to hear something concrete. Needing to. He shook his head, both in answer to her question and to try to clear it. “No. Just… Like people talking in a room down the hall.”

Maria put her hands on her hips, clearly annoyed. “Great. Okay—you need to leave.”

He really didn’t want to do that. “Fury wanted—“

“The Director has ordered out everyone else who’s had any unnatural reaction to the device.”

“Are we sure it’s a device?” Steve asked. “How do we know it’s not some sort of—“

The roar of jets cut him off and he and Maria looked up to see Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit coming in for a landing beside them. 

“So this is our mind-sucking space rock?” Stark asked, flipping up the visor on his suit. His jets had drowned out the whispers for a moment, but Steve was already back to trying to figure out what they were saying. It was annoying. But he had to know...

“Sounds far fetched when you say it like that,” he muttered.

“I don’t think it matters how you say it,” Stark countered mildly. “And the radiation and electromagnetic signature are just too regular to be a random... space… rock...” Maria had been looking at him very closely and he’d finally noticed. “What?”

“Do you hear anything?”

Stark looked at her, confused by the question. “Cows.”

“What about seeing things?” she persisted. “When you look out at the field, what do you see?”

The man dutifully turned to look out at the field. “Alien device. Some grass. Again, cows.” He turned back, concern in his eyes. “Is this thing causing hallucinations? Because it’s not really emitting anything that should be causing that.”

Maria shifted her gaze to Steve, and he felt the pressure to answer. “When I look at it, I hear whispers,” he admitted, almost sheepishly. He just wanted to know what they were  _ saying _ .

“Sweet-nothing whispers, or faster-pussycat-kill-kill whispers?” came the quick response.

Steve turned on Stark. The man couldn't be serious to save his life! A violent rush of emotion overtook him without warning and he stepped closer, fists balling dangerously.

“Well, they were just vague whispers,” he heard himself snarl, accent flattening out like he was back in a Brooklyn alley. “Could be they’re telling me to wipe that smirk off your face.”

Stark looked at him in surprise and a touch of worry, and Steve stepped back in shock. Stark could be annoying, but there’d been no call for that kind of reaction.

Steve shook his head, apologetic. What was going on here? “I don’t know why—“

“Yeah….” Stark looked him up and down, the worry more pronounced now. “Maybe you better leave, Captain.” He didn’t even sound particularly brusque, but Steve could feel the anger rise again anyway. It was completely irrational.

He looked out at the meteorite, taking a few deep breaths to try to keep the strange feelings at bay. The whispers were still there. Like sandpaper. The rising feeling of both dread and need made him think Stark had a good idea. But he couldn’t leave. He balled his hands back into fists, nails digging into his palms. “What  _ is _ that thing?”

He could sense both Stark and Maria watching him and there was that irritation crawling under his skin at the scrutiny. It felt eerily familiar, but he couldn’t put a reason to it. He took another long, deep breath as Stark focused back on the meteorite.

Stark flipped his visor down, and started talking to his computer. “Jarvis, run a full spectrum analysis. I want everything, not just high-frequency.”

Radiation. “Would radiation cause reactions in only some people?” Steve wondered aloud. Could it cause more than just hallucinations?

“Huh,” Stark muttered quietly, not listening.

He’d obviously found something, but Steve was too focused on the whispers from the device to really care. It was like he was right on the edge of hearing them properly. If he just got a little closer… He startled at the thought and realized that he was already in the process of walking forward. It took effort to stop himself. 

The feeling of being out of control was starting to wear on him.

“Okay,” Stark was saying. Talking to himself or his suit, it didn’t really matter. Steve had begun to wonder if they weren’t sort of the same thing. Artificial intelligence hadn’t even been in its infancy in 1945, and the concept of talking to a machine like it was a person took a lot of getting used to. Howard had never talked to any of his machines—of course most of his hadn’t talked back the way Jarvis did.

“Give me a broad frequency spread,” Stark continued. His visor was back up. “Say… three decibels?” He was looking at Steve closely again and Steve again had to fight the urge to hit him.

“Now, Jarvis.”

The whispers stopped.

Reflexively, Steve drew a deep breath and felt none of the anger and longing he’d felt just seconds ago. He smiled at the release of pressure against his mind. Looking at Stark in surprise, he didn’t even want to punch the smug look off the man’s face.

“What happened?” Maria asked, amazed. “It’s like the air suddenly got... lighter.”

“Subaudible static,” Stark said, still watching Steve. This time, Steve saw the concern for what it was. “I made a white noise generator.” Stark turned toward the device, eyes narrowing. “The device emits broad spectrum radiation, but it also emits bursts in the supervisual and subaudible ranges, so people with exceptional hearing,” he nodded to Steve, “or variations in eyesight react to it.”

“Makes sense,” Maria said quietly. “But why do  _ I _ feel different?”

Stark shrugged with his eyebrows. “You were reacting on some level. Maybe you’re more exceptional than you thought.”

“It was like bugs...” she mused, ignoring the flirtatious comment.

“Crawling underneath your skin,” Steve completed the thought. He stepped forward under his own power this time, focusing back on the mission at hand now that he didn’t feel the pull of the whispers any longer. He hadn’t really processed how relentless it was until it was gone. “Let’s figure out what this thing is.”

* * * * * * * *

Tony shook his head at Rogers and his gung ho attitude. “Hang on,” he said quietly, glad when the supersoldier didn’t turn on him again. They’d come to an agreement, maybe even a camaraderie—sort of—after New York, hadn’t they? Okay, Rogers probably more respected him than liked him, and vice versa, but the guy was clearly being influenced in more ways than just the voices in his head.

The device was amping him up, and a man who could do the damage  _ he _ could do, being forced to the edge of violence? A little like poking Bruce Banner with a stick. No, Tony needed to get a handle on this, but the unconscious clenching and unclenching of Rogers’s right fist was more than enough reason to tread carefully. The white noise seemed to be blocking most of the device's effects for now, but Tony didn’t trust that to last. Easy things never did.

“Why don’t we just take a minute?” He looked Rogers up and down and saw a clear-eyed, purposeful gaze come back at him. But still that fist kept going. “Hear anything?”

“Cows,” Rogers replied, a faint smirk on his face and relief clear in his eyes.

“Funny.” Tony turned toward the device in the field. The  _ alien _ device in the field. He took a deep breath. trying to slow his heart rate. At least it didn’t seem to be trying its whammy on him. “Have I mentioned how much I hate aliens?”

Rogers walked forward a few steps and Tony reached out to stop him. “Wait—”

“It’s okay,” Rogers replied. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to go dark side on you.”

Hill stifled a laugh and Tony settled for an incredulous look. Rogers grinned, but looked a little unsure of himself. “I’ve been catching up.”

“And if you were 30 and still living in your mother’s basement, that would’ve been funny,” Tony broke to him gently.

“Biologically, I’m only 27, and my mom’s been dead for almost 75 years,” Rogers retorted, a little coldly, turning back to the device. Yeah, Cap was still  _ itching _ to get at that thing. Letting Rogers near it was a very, very, bad idea.

“Technically, you’re pushing the century mark, so what do you say you let a youngster take the first look?” Tony offered.

Rogers gave him an almost violent glare and his hand clenched again. Tony was sure he had no idea he was doing it. Surprisingly, though, Rogers took a deep breath and backed off. “I’ll keep back,” he said quietly; tightly, like it was hard to say it. “If it’ll make you feel better.”

“Well… good then.” Tony turned to the device, trying to breathe. Funny. He didn’t feel better. “Right,” he said, stepping forward and closing his faceplate—just in case. “Youngster, going in.”

As he stepped down into the shallow crater, Tony considered the blackened, half-melted shell covering the device. The light shining through the cracks was becoming more pronounced as the day shaded toward evening, and in person, it looked more blue than green. He watched it pulse in time to the near-gamma rays he was tracking on his HUD. In some ways the radiation was similar to the Tesseract, but it wasn’t really the same. Thank God.

The scans showed that at least part of the radiation of the device was being shielded by the coating. He needed to see how strong it was. Which meant he needed to clear away the blackened hull. Which meant he needed to touch it.

“See, this is the problem with being a genius.”

Well, the suit was obviously protecting him from whatever the device was doing to Rogers and the others who’d been affected, right? Still.... He’d done his bit for radiation poisoning. “Increase shielding to 125%.”

“Sir, the recently repaired damage could easily fail given the extra strain of—”

“Just do it, Jarvis,” Tony said as calmly as he could. He didn’t want to think about the recently repaired damage. He didn’t want to think about what had  _ caused _ the recently repaired damage.

“Yes, sir.” The computer sounded put-upon, as usual. “Shielding boosted to 125% maximum. Extremities may begin to lose integrity in 24 minutes.”

Tony reached forward, glad the gauntlet wasn’t shaking from the minute tremors running through his fingers. Alien. God, he hated aliens. “Plenty of time.”

His glove brushed the outer crust lightly without touching the device itself, dislodging a large flake of it to expose more glowing blue. The thing was covered with a tracery of etchings, looking like some sort of alien circuit board. He checked the energy levels and saw a build up in gamma and near-gamma radiation. Slow, but definitely increasing.

He’d just reached out again to brush away more of the blackened hull when the graph on his HUD started spiking. At the same time as he heard Hill give a shout behind him. Supervisual output suddenly increased 200%, and the suit’s visual filter wavered under the onslaught, leaving him in the dark for a moment before it stabilized.

“Don’t touch it!” That almost sounded like Rogers. But more desperate than Rogers had probably ever sounded.

Something hit Tony like a ton of bricks and he was thrown back hard. He could dimly hear Hill call out again as another spike in near-gamma radiation hit, and the suit shut down to protect itself. The impact rang his bell and the world blinked out for a minute. When it came back, it would be infinitely more complicated.

* * * * * * * *

_to be continued..._


	2. Chapter 2

Steve watched as Stark approached the device, thinking over what they knew of the effects of it. Visual and auditory hallucinations, increased aggression… He wanted to get a closer look at it. Try to figure out what it was saying.

“Captain?”

Maria’s worried query made him look back at her. She was watching his right hand.

He looked at the fist he hadn’t known he was making and consciously relaxed it, showing nail-shaped cuts, shallow in his palm. Taking a deep breath, he tried to block out the feelings chewing into his brain. _Focus on what we know._ Stark might have been blocking the whispers, but Steve still felt like he was fighting it. “What other ‘unnatural’ reactions did people have to it?”

 _“Increase shielding to 125%,”_ he heard Stark say, the sound barely audible at this distance, even to his ears. Well, at least Stark was taking precautions. His dad hadn’t been keen on precautions when they met. Howard had had to learn the hard way and Steve was willing to bet Tony had, too.

“Like I said, we had a few incidents. Violent outbursts like…”

Steve grinned wryly. “Like threatening to take Stark’s head off?”

Maria watched Stark, who was leaning over to take a better look at the device. She smirked. “I don’t know if I’d consider that unnatural, Captain Rogers.”

No. Probably not. Steve had a hard time seeing Howard in Tony. Not that he _didn’t_ see him—it just always seemed to be the bad bits. Like his dad, Tony seemed to speak first and worry about people’s feelings later. He was rich enough to think there was always a way out of any problem, and too smart to realize that sometimes there wasn’t.

 _“Plenty of time,”_ Stark said.

The _way_ he said it set off alarm bells in Steve’s mind and he began walking toward the device. Stark couldn’t possibly be thinking about touching it? God, he really _was_ just like Howard!

The whispers were back, not as loud as they had been, but somehow still shrieking at the edges of his brain, demanding to be heard. Steve didn’t think anymore, didn’t reason. He just broke into a run, hearing Hill’s hastily voiced protest behind him but knowing that he had to stop what was about to happen.

“What are you doing? CAPTAIN!”

Stark’s hand was hovering just over the device, a soft blue glow discoloring his battered suit. The blue flashed brighter and Steve came near and grabbed Stark’s gauntlet, shoving the man back hard as sphere briefly flared white hot.

“Don’t touch it!” A too-vivid memory of another Stark risking too much melded with an irresistible and alien need to protect the device—

At his violent blow and the equally violent white surge from the device, the lights had gone out on Stark’s suit and now the whole thing fell backward like a discarded plank of wood. The white noise generator shut off with it.

“Captain Rogers!”

Steve looked up from the darkened armor to see Maria standing where he’d left her, raw concern on her face. Looking back down, he fought to dredge up worry for the man in the suit… But the whispers were so close now, with the white noise gone. He could almost understand them. If he just reached out and...

“Captain,” Maria called again, sharp and commanding, “don’t—”

_touch it._

Without conscious thought, Steve’s hand gently touched the exposed hull of the device, the whispers becoming almost words—

He came to himself as the contact sent a jolt through him, an almost pain he instinctively fought against. He tried to pull away but his hand only burned, tried to silence the thoughts that were even worse than bugs under his skin now but they couldn’t be silenced. _killmake_ war _now_ burn _killstrike_. Images of death and destruction and evil… Beetles in his brain, digging and burrowing and eating away....

The pain in his hand, the smell of the flesh burning, was too much on top of the feeling of something not meant to be there, battering at his mind.

He threw back his head and screamed.

* * * * * * * * *

“All systems back online.”

Okay. Tony shook his head a little and moaned at his own stupidity. When had they gone _offline_?

“Mr. Stark?” Agent Hill, tinny in his ear. “Stark, can you hear me?”

What was that noise? Like a freight train. _Huffa-huffa-huffa-huffa..._

“Captain Rogers?” Still Hill. Outside though, not in. Through the external mic. “Do you hear me?”

“...yes…” _huffa-huffa-huffa_

That sounded all kinds of wrong. Steve Rogers wasn’t weak and he wasn’t scared. Tony snapped his eyes open, fully alert. What he saw made him scramble to his feet.

“Crap.”

The device had somehow shed the last of its protective shell in the energy spike that had knocked out the suit’s electrical system. It revealed itself to be a perfect, etched, glowing blue sphere. It looked familiar in the worst way.

 _Tesseract blue_ his brain supplied, following the observation up with a surge of raw fear so sharp it seemed to stop his heart for a moment. He regained his mental footing with difficulty; gave himself a shake. The energy signatures were different, it wasn’t the Tesseract, and he needed to get a grip and deal with the problem at hand.

 _I might not be the only one with heart trouble,_ he thought, staring at the scene before him. Rogers stood rigid with his eyes screwed shut, his left hand on the now steadily glowing device. He was panting too hard—looked like he was having a coronary. Whatever it was doing to him, it wasn’t the simple touch-and-drop it had done to Guppy Farrar.

“J, give me vitals on Captain Rogers.”

The HUD came up with the information and Tony ground his teeth. Not good at all. Rogers’s heart rate was 180, which wasn’t bad for a regular human in a lot of pain, but when your resting heart rate was 25, that was a little concerning. His body temperature was rising beyond what even a super soldier like him should be able to withstand.…

“Well, this isn’t good.” Tony pulled up the energy output graphs on the sphere and watched as an overlay on the view in front of him showed arcs of near-gamma radiation joining the visible blue arcs of electricity crawling up Rogers’s arm. Nothing lingered beyond the two of them. Everything was being funneled into Rogers, the radiation itself settling a little too comfortably into his brain while the electricity burned through his skin.

Tony thought of Guppy Farrar and wondered what had happened there. The electricity hadn’t burned him much at all and his radiation levels were relatively low. Had the sphere just rejected him out of hand, damaging him in the process but somehow sensing he was too weak for whatever it had planned? Was anyone _not_ too weak for this? Rogers might be an enhanced human, but Tony didn’t like even _his_ odds on lasting much longer than a few minutes.

And yet, he’d answered Hill when she called him...

“How’s it going there, Captain?” Tony asked casually, taking a step forward.

“Get back, Stark!” Rogers’ voice was dark and harsh and scared and sounded all kinds of painful. His eyes were still shut—how had he even known Tony had moved?—but he was clearly conscious and thinking.

“Yeah, no,” Tony said, watching the data and trying to figure out what the sphere was doing. Besides trying to kill Steve Rogers. His heart sank in sudden realization. The sphere was losing power. Slowly….

“No, you know, I think—maybe—I should stay right here.” He wasn’t even sure if he could find a way to separate them without killing Rogers, but that thing had already been provoking the guy to violence from a distance. If its power was funnelled directly into him? A man designed to wage war…?

“Agent Hill,” he asked quietly, turning off the external speakers and tapping into the bluetooth receiver he knew she’d have on. Rogers flinched at the words he shouldn’t have been able to hear, and Tony wondered if the sphere was amplifying his hearing or if it was tapping into the suit’s communications. Either way, he’d have to watch his words.

“Mr. Stark, thank God!” Hill sounded scared. Which freaked Tony right out. “What is Captain Rogers’s status?”

Tony looked past the data on his screens and saw that Rogers’s hand was burnt nearly black where it lay on the surface of the sphere. The glowing, bluish net of something like electricity was traveling up his arm slowly and Tony tried not to think about how it was burning the rest of him as it went. It seemed like the energy was fighting to get where it was going, too… Whatever this thing was, it must have raced straight into Farrar, leaving mild burns in its wake. By fighting it, Rogers was inflicting his own damage on himself.

“Not great,” he told her shortly. “What happened while I was out?”

“Um…” She pulled herself together quickly. “When you tried to touch the device, Captain Rogers shoved you away—”

“Did he scream ‘don’t touch’, by any chance?” Damn it. He’d known the white noise wouldn’t block the sphere forever, but he’d hoped it’d last longer than that.

“Just like Farrar, yes,” she affirmed. “It glowed incredibly bright for a moment, and then he just… reached out and put his hand on it.” He could hear her swallow hard from here. “Then he screamed. He hasn’t moved since—at least until you woke up.”

Yeah. Tony looked at the glow that was now creeping toward Rogers’s shoulder, watched as his jaw clenched so hard a normal man’s teeth would have shattered.

“So I’m guessing the whispers told him to do it,” Tony muttered. “All right, I want to try—”

Rogers stopped them with a shout of pain and a moment where he seemed not to have the control to breathe, much less pant against the agony of it. The glow retreated down his arm about an inch for a moment before resuming its relentless climb. 

“Stark, it’s… trying to get inside me.” Tony froze at the tiny, desperate voice. Even faced with a legion of alien marauders, he hadn’t heard Rogers terrified. “It’s... Just get them back.”

Tony turned away from Rogers’s raw fear and his eyes lit on Agent Hill, now surrounded by about half a dozen others, some in lab coats, but all armed and ready.

Not ready for this, though, he was sure.

“Hill, pull your people back,” he said firmly, knowing she’d fight him on it. “One mile perimeter.”

“Be ready…” Rogers took a deep shuddering breath and God damn it, he _whimpered_. Whatever it was doing to him, it had to hurt. “Scramble jets for an airstrike.” His eyes opened, and Tony reeled at the horror in them. “Now.”

“Captain Rogers—” Hill began.

“GET BACK!” The combined shout from Tony and Rogers decided her, and she and her people mobilized. Rogers kept his eyes on Tony and went back to panting.

“What’s with the airstrike, Captain?” Tony asked quietly. “You said it’s trying to get inside you.” He swallowed. He was not going to throw up, even though he knew the answer to the question he was about to ask. “What does it want?”

Rogers closed his eyes again. “It wants to kill.”

Tony nodded. Starting with Captain America. The blue glow kept on creeping through Rogers’s arm, and Tony had a hunch he knew what it had planned—maybe even what it was. It wanted to kill, all right. And it needed a vessel. He stepped forward.

“Get back,” Rogers begged, again sensing the movement without opening his eyes.

“Okay.” Tony complied, stepping back again and trying to sift through the data he had. There had to be a way to separate them. He looked at his radiation-shielded gauntlets. Maybe it was that easy. “I’m just going to try to pull you away from there…”

Rogers reached out his free hand—the one not fused, not yet glowing—and grabbed hard at Tony’s arm before shoving him away.

“I said GET BACK!”

Even with the suit on, even with Rogers in obvious agony from whatever that thing was doing to him, Tony landed on his butt three yards away with the violence of the move. Rogers cried out in anger and pain.

And Jarvis blinked. It was the only way Tony could think of it. The whole system flickered for the briefest of seconds, as if the suit had blinked in surprise at Rogers’s attack.

“Huh.” The suit had gone down before when Rogers touched it. Tony had thought it’d been the sphere’s power surge, but maybe it was more than that. Or wait—no, maybe it was even simpler. A computer protecting itself from a hack...

“Just give me a minute here, okay?” Tony ignored Rogers’s angry glare. He was starting to believe the look had little to do with the captain's own thoughts. (And that didn’t make his heart race _at all_.)

The sphere was losing power. Power it was funneling into Rogers… “It’s more than power,” he muttered finally. “It’s data.”

“It’s alive,” Rogers choked out, as if to refute him.

* * * * * * * * *

_It’s alive and it’s trying to take over._

It was the one truth Steve had to hold on to right now. Not one he particularly wanted to contemplate, but it was something to fight against and that was all he had. Was this what Barton had felt, when Loki slammed into his mind and shoved him to the side?

Steve couldn’t feel his hand anymore, but it wasn’t a relief. The pain and burning had moved to his upper arm and shoulder, had started crawling through into his chest, like billions of fire ants chewing him up from the inside.

God, how did he fight _this_?

The whispers had died when he touched the sphere, as if they’d only been a lure to get him there. They’d been replaced by an overwhelming need to kill. Maim, strike out, fight…. Images whirled in his mind of death and war—he looked at Stark and saw both an ally and a potential target. Someone he could take apart.

He could feel the nails of his right hand drawing blood, as they had been for a while now, and fought against the feelings that the fire ants brought with them. He was stronger than this. He didn’t kill randomly. He didn’t enjoy it.

But they wanted him to.

“Stark…” He looked up at the man, finding every opening in the armor, fixing on the best way to tear it apart and get to the man inside. Thinking about what it would feel like to snap bones and…

“Stark, go.”

He could do it with one hand, maybe. A drop of blood dripped from his right fist onto the ground.

“Go _now_.”

* * * * * * * * *

Tony nodded at the pain and desperation in Rogers’s voice. He wasn’t going anywhere. “Jarvis, bring up an analysis of the energy output from the circuit between Rogers and the sphere.”

He still thought he might be able to pull Rogers off of it, if the suit could hold out long enough. Or maybe he could just blast the point of contact. Blow out the port? It could work. Would be all kinds of painful for Cap, but it could work.

Or kill them both. Maybe take out half the county. It was a big sphere, after all. A big sphere with lots of data, trying to pour it all into one super soldier body. It must have wanted to do the same thing with Farrar, but realized he just wasn’t strong enough to hold it. 

It wasn’t alive—at least not in the sense of being a biological entity. There was no evidence to say that. It was a computer. Had to be. An AI. So, why did it want a biological receptacle? The audio and visual hallucinations must have been designed as a lure, but it would only have worked on curious earthlings… Or planetlings of some sort, he supposed.

Probably couldn’t use a simple computer if the database was too complex. It needed something sentient, maybe? For processing? The human brain was one of the most efficient computing devices ever created, after all.

 _At least on Earth,_ his own brain supplied, causing him to shudder. _Maybe people on its planet are stronger..._

“The energy transfer is shielded,” Jarvis said after a long moment. Tony cursed. Of course it was, because it was trying to transfer data in a secure stream. From one brain to another. “Any external application of force would be met with intense resistance.”

“But would it interrupt the stream?” That was the important part. Jarvis _had_ blinked, after all. Maybe the AI blinked, too. A long enough blink and maybe he could just pull Rogers out of there and blast the thing to scrap.

Rogers looked like he was ready to pass out, but either his own stubbornness or the connection kept him upright and conscious. And in pain. They needed to end this quickly.

“Jarvis?” Tony prompted when no answer to his question was forthcoming. He hated when the AI did this. Seriously. He’d think the thing was going for a dramatic pause if it was human.

“Possibly.”

Tony narrowed his eyes. “Possibly?” He looked up as Rogers failed to hold in a shout of pain as the glow moved slowly toward his neck. According to the HUD, it looked like the burns were purely electrical and thermal damage instead of radiation, thank God, but they had to be excruciating. “How possibly?”

“There is a 45% possibility that applying an external force will in fact increase the circuit efficiency.”

Almost as if the sphere wanted them to know that it had heard them, the blue glow abruptly spread to engulf half of Rogers’ chest and he stopped breathing for a long moment, though Jarvis’s scan insisted that his heart was still beating. Whatever was downloading itself into the man, it was efficient enough already. Rogers started breathing again and looked up at him.

“Damn it, Stark, will you GO?!” He was done trying to hide the pain now. He was breathing in huge gulps and the murder in his eyes was as much his own irritation as the database’s influence. The guy did hate to be ignored.

“Whatever it’s doing to me, you don’t want to be around when it’s done.” His clear blue eyes bored through Tony’s mask and speared him candidly. “Go. Come back with enough firepower to take us down.”

 _Us_. Rogers was still looking at it as a living thing, intent on taking over and wreaking havoc, and he was willing to sacrifice himself to contain it.

“Contain it…” Tony looked back at the sphere. “Jarvis, can you interface with it?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Jarvis asked, scandalized. You know, someday he was going to create an AI that didn’t talk back. Tony smirked to himself—probably wasn’t going to live long enough to rethink that pledge.

“Not external energy,” he prompted gently, knowing that, based on their past together, his AI would understand the plan. “Internal.”

Jarvis was quiet for a long second, contemplating what Tony was asking him to do. Almost like he _was_ sentient, which he almost was. Tony sure hoped the alien database thought so, too.

“Yes.” Jarvis’s answer was as hesitant as any he’d ever given, and Tony fought not to hyperventilate as he again heard the memory of Jarvis asking him whether he should dial Pepper one last time… This time, though, the AI didn’t think it was Tony he’d would be risking, it was himself.

“Run the Dolly protocol and pull back to the tower,” Tony said, gritting his teeth to keep control and writing a quick subroutine that would hopefully cause the feedback loop they needed while Jarvis cloned himself and retreated to the mainframe back home. At least _Jarvis_ would be safe, right?

Tony outlined the information he had and sent it to Fury, just in case the shit hit the fan immediately. Jarvis would relate it to Pepper and whoever else needed it if he didn’t contact the AI in 24 hours. 

He tacked Bruce on to the send list for the delayed message, adding a private note suggesting he consult off-site—the gamma radiation was pretty minimal, but it was Bruce’s kind of radiation and the violence of the thing made hulking out just too great a possibility. 

Tony couldn’t think of a way to say what he _should_ say to Pepper, so he left her private note blank. Probably catch hell for that later on.

He couldn’t risk saying too much out loud with the sphere listening, so he finished his set up silently and then opened a channel to Hill.

“Might be a good idea to get those jets Captain Rogers was talking about,” he told her candidly. “But don’t fire unless one of us forces you to.”

“What are you doing, Mr. Stark?” she asked. Sounded like she was even a little bit worried about him.

“Just standby.”

 _Okay. Show time._ Tony took a deep breath and double checked the timing on the ejection system. Too early, and he wouldn’t be able to control the shutdown. Too late, and he’d be riding that database instead of a Jarvis clone. In which case, Hill had really better have those jets ready.

He was hoping to live long enough to figure this whole thing out, though. Was hoping Rogers did, too. Though that last was looking sort of iffy.

The captain was barely breathing now, as the glow slowly worked its way up his neck. After that last outburst, his face had gone slack, the heat of the transfer giving a flush to an otherwise dead visage. His body stood straight and tall, through no effort of his own as far as Tony could tell, and his right hand had finally opened from its fist, fingers spread wide so that the cuts on his palm were clearly visible. And still there was a defiance about him. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. The blue glow was more diffuse and the nonvisible radiation was pretty much all in his brain now—they were running out of time. 

“Rogers?” Tony shook his head. “Steve? Can you hear me?”

He got nothing—which was, sadly, what he expected. He didn’t know if Rogers would survive this, but it had gone beyond that consideration. He’d have to move fast now, before the thing finished downloading. If he could get it to jump ship, the suit was something he could control—something he was willing to destroy if he had to. Steve Rogers didn’t fall into that same category.

“Mark VII AI is isolated,” announced something that almost sounded like Jarvis. The cloned AI was duller, less alive. Jarvis didn’t fall into that category, either, as far as Tony was concerned. No, the suit just had to be lively enough for the alien program to take the bait, which was why he was staying, to provide that “human touch”. 

“Ophelia protocol uploaded and primed,” the suit continued.

Tony stepped forward and Rogers jerked his head up to meet his gaze. There was a light in his eyes that wasn’t him. The glow still hadn’t reached his head, but something alien was starting to shine through in his face.

Crap.

“Okay, Captain,” Tony took a deep breath. “Don’t know if you’re you in there anymore, but—”

“Tony, get away.” The response both surprised and saddened him. Rogers’s voice was hopelessly rocky and tiny and almost garbled, like something else was getting ready to use those vocal chords for another purpose. He sounded defeated and Tony didn’t like that—he hoped it didn’t make this more difficult. “ _Please_.”

“You know how I said I’d rather cut the wire?” Tony asked quietly. “I’m going to have to try it your way this time.” He watched Rogers try to process what he was saying, saw denial behind the rising glow in his eyes. There was a spark of fight left in there after all. The glow seemed to intensify, as if the sphere was having to fight harder again to get what it wanted.

“Stark, don’t—“

Tony grabbed Steve’s hand and felt a surge of power slam into him so hard he wondered how Rogers had survived even the short time they’d been here. _He_ was ready to pass out and the energy wasn’t even really touching him. Not directly.

The surge threatened to shut down the suit, though, and Tony had to force the operating system to keep an open port for the alien system to access. He tried to keep his eyes on Rogers—use him as a gauge of whether this was working at all. Rogers gave out a scream about thirty seconds in, but the glow shifted quickly, sensing another target. Instead of creeping up his neck as it had been, the glow now ran in a definite path from the sphere through his arms and chest and into the gauntlet on Tony’s hand.

“That’s right,” Tony murmured. “Yummy hard drive space, right here…”

He tilted his head down as much as his overloaded exoskeleton would allow and looked at the way his suit’s glove glowed. So far, so good. But Rogers was still attached, and Tony didn’t think the guy had much left in him. Once the glow had consolidated itself, he seemed to be little more than a suit on a shining blue clothes line, his head flopping down as his whole lower body sagged.

By this point, it was almost too hard for Tony to force his free hand to shove itself onto the sphere, but he’d had to wait to be sure the alien device would buy that Clone Jarvis was a worthy mark. If not, all he’d’ve succeeded in doing was frying the suit, Rogers, and likely himself. Now that he could see the energy outputs rising in the suit’s systems, he could cut the captain loose and ride this out until the process had hit the point of no return. He slammed his hand down on the surface of the sphere and hoped for the best.

With the direct connection, the power surged even higher which, really, he hadn’t been sure was possible. He could feel his body start to twitch as the electrical and… well, _alien_ energy surged through the suit. The one good side effect was that Rogers let out one more pitiful groan and started to fall away from him as the sphere released its hold on his hand in favor of what it thought was a larger vessel.

The suit’s arm locked, though, the hand holding tight to Rogers’ own.

“Damn it!” Tony wasn’t sure why he thought Clone Jarvis would respond—it was a little busy being taken over by a space computer—but he tried anyway. “Jarvis, release left hand!”

Then he tried letting go himself, knowing it was useless. The entire suit was locked up now. The glow had mostly dissipated from Rogers, but he was unconscious—Tony hoped—his body twitching in time to the suit’s own near convulsions. Even if he was still alive, he wasn’t going to be able to take much more. Radiation was swirling around the suit in ever-lessening eddies, but Tony sort of thought Rogers had had enough for a while.

All right, this was going to hurt. He had to hope the alien computer was committed to Clone Jarvis now. The glow enveloped the entire suit and the sphere itself was down to 30% of its initial energy level. If letting go of Rogers didn’t work, it was going to mean being trapped in the suit, because the pilot eject would probably be fried, too. He accessed the secondary systems, hoping the sphere was too busy with Clone Jarvis to notice. “Emergency jettison, left gauntlet.” That sounded good. Calm.

But all in all, it was a dumb thing to do.

Tony had a whole new level of respect for Rogers, as the gauntlet shot off, taking Rogers with it, and the alien data tried to swarm through the opening in the suit and into him. It didn’t burn him physically, though he would have preferred that. Instead it touched his brain with oily fingers, searching for an in. His mind tried to shut down. Alien. Alien was bad. Alien was—

“...Stark...”

Rogers’ voice was a mere croak, but it brought Tony out of his panic. Briefly. God, it felt like his _mind_ was being burned like Rogers’s skin!

“Stark—Tony!? Can you hear me?”

Super soldier son-of-bitch actually made it to his knees, still gripping the gauntlet in a blackened claw of a hand.

“Glove. Now.” Tony barely got the words out—had no idea if he could be heard outside the suit. He knew he was taking yet another hit of radiation (and really, how much could one guy take in a lifetime?), but he was more concerned by the searing bugs eating through his gray matter. The sphere’s energy read 5% and dropping. Thank God—time to go. He triggered the sequester program first, and then the eject—and almost sobbed when he didn’t feel it engage.

"Oh, come on!"

The HUD went dark, then blazingly bright. Blinded, Tony had a brief moment of pain and of all-engulfing wrongness — _killmaim_ destroytake _have_ need _burn_ killtake _maim_ KILL— before he felt the whoosh of the ejection system finally take him. He slammed into the ground, sliding gratefully into silence.

* * * * * * * * *

_to be continued..._


	3. Chapter 3

“There’s a line you need to recognize, between obedience and stupidity,” Director Fury had once told her. “It’s pretty much the same line between courage and cowardice. Knowing where it is, is the mark of a good agent.”

Maria Hill was a good agent.

She had indeed moved her people out, past the one-mile cordon they’d established when Guppy Farrar was found. But someone got conveniently left behind.

She stayed at what she thought was a healthy distance, so she wasn’t close enough to see what was happening inside the crater. But she did hear more than she wanted to.

“Base, this is Hill,” she said quietly, hoping her comlink to headquarters didn’t pick up the captain’s screams too clearly. “We need three fighters scrambled to the landing site for a possible clean sweep, plus full medical evac standing by.”

“Hill, what the hell is happening?” Director Fury demanded over the line, making her jump. He was never a patient man when it came to information he was missing. Unfortunately, she couldn’t offer him what she didn’t have.

“It’s unclear at the moment, sir,” she told him calmly, feeling anything but, as Rogers’s screams cut off. She hadn’t known he could scream like that. Just one more piece of knowledge she could do without. “Captain Rogers may have been compromised. Stark has taken measures to contain the situation, but they’ve asked that we have missiles standing by.”

There was a dangerous pause over the line. Maria didn’t often fear for her job, except during these rare dangerous pauses. “Keep me informed, Agent,” he muttered angrily. “Don’t let Stark try to blow himself up again.”

A bright flash of light lit up the area around the device and something hit the ground hard enough that she could hear it from her safety point a quarter mile away. “That might have already happened, sir,” she sighed quietly, as the dark of late evening descended again. “Approaching the site.”

The Director growled over the line, but got control of himself immediately. “Jets and medical are en route. Two and ten minutes.”

Maria was running for the site as she listened, but stopped dead at the edge of the crater. The Iron Man suit stood ramrod straight and dark but it was missing half an arm and the back had been blown out. Tony Stark lay in the grass above the crater, ten yards away, looking broken and lifeless.

Captain Rogers was probably dead, and if he wasn’t, he’d want to be when he woke. He was curled at the foot of the suit, the missing arm nearby, as if he’d dropped it. His hands were black with burns and his neck was red and bleeding and blistered. She assumed from the stains seeping through under his shirt that his chest and back looked about the same. It took a minute of watching, but she saw his chest rise and fall enough times to convince herself it wasn’t her imagination. She had no idea the extent of his injuries and she wasn’t about to try to touch him—especially if whatever he’d been fighting had won before Stark did whatever he’d done.

Speaking of, she reluctantly approached the man sprawled beyond the crater, surprised to find Stark’s arc reactor glowing steadily against an unevenly rising chest. She wondered idly just how many lives Tony Stark had left in him.

The alien device, when she finally turned to it, was cold and dull and seemed utterly inert.

She hoped that didn’t mean what she thought it meant. She confirmed again that Rogers remained unconscious, but her hand drifted to stay close to her sidearm. If he was seriously compromised, she was going to have to be the one to try to take down Captain America. After watching him in action in New York last month, she wasn't sure one clip was going to be enough.

“Agents, move in,” she called over the comms to her people. She knew the Director was waiting on her assessment and she was glad to give him at least some good news. “Sir, the threat appears contained for now. We should leave the jets on standby, though.” She knelt beside Stark, whose chest stopped rising for too long before starting up again. How would they even restart his heart if that stopped? Jumper cables? She sure wasn’t taking the arc reactor out to get at it. He stopped breathing again and the arc reactor flickered slightly. “And hurry the med crew.”

“I just received an email from Stark,” the Director said heavily. She wondered when he’d had time to send that with all that had happened. She wanted to read it. “What is Captain Rogers’s status?”

“Unconscious for now, sir,” she replied. This really wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d been called in last night. “I’ll call in my containment unit for him, the suit, and the device.” She looked back at it. “Which looks to be neutralized.”  _ I hope _ .

“Medical evac revised to eight minutes now, ma’am,” Agent Dawson told her, appearing suddenly at her elbow. He didn’t look like he’d run a mile. She smiled as the rest of her crew broke cover and approached. It seemed Nick Fury had surrounded himself with a bunch of rule breakers.

Or at least a bunch of people more obedient than stupid.

* * * * * * * * *

Pepper Potts wasn’t sure she could stop shaking, even after Tony was settled in his room on Triskelion’s med floor. The burns to his eyes and the broken bones had been addressed, the heart scans and the medical support measures were explained to her. The radiation damage was minimal, they said. Not worth worrying about.  _ This time. _

Maria Hill had had a meal and a cup of coffee brought in and had sat with her and talked when she needed her to and stayed silent when she needed that instead. And still, Pepper shook.

She’d done all this already. Missed the signs, only to have him save himself from the radiation she hadn't known was killing him. Missed the last phone call, only to find out after the fact that he’d died—but not really. He’d called this time, too, but his message been blithe and unconcerned—”Fury wants me to poke that space rock that fell in Pennsylvania. I’ll be home by dinner.”

She snorted in anger. Home by dinner. And yet, here she was again, called back from California after he’d already been saved—before she even knew he was in trouble. And he’d again beaten odds no one knew existed. He’d managed, once more, to not leave her alone.

_ This time. _

“He’ll be okay, Miss Potts.” Maria sounded quietly confident. Pepper hadn’t met her before, but Phil had spoken favorably of her before New York. She seemed like a no-nonsense agent with a good sense of right and wrong—something Pepper thought too many of them lacked. And Tony liked her, which was endorsement enough.

“Pepper, please,” Pepper corrected. “I know he will. Tony’s always okay.”  _ And if he’s not, he fakes it well enough that nobody knows. _

“You’ve read the data he sent to Director Fury?” Maria asked. When Pepper nodded mutely, she continued. “He knew what he was doing.”

“He always knows what he’s doing, too,” she replied wryly. “Sometimes he just does incredibly stupid things.”

“If the device had been allowed to complete its transfer, Captain Rogers would be dead,” Maria tried to remind her, making Pepper’s teeth itch. She was so sick of hearing things like that— _ if Tony wasn’t off playing superhero, he wouldn’t be lying here in too many pieces. _ “Or worse.”

Which should have made her feel better, except that there was always an "or worse" to anything Tony did these days.

"You know, when I met him, he wasn’t the kind of guy I'd expect to be a hero."

Pepper laughed blackly at Maria's quiet announcement. "No. Hero is not a word that usually comes to mind when people think of Tony Stark."

"Things change, Pepper." The silence stretched between them. "It might be the  _ first _ word people think of these days. Heroes pay a heavy price. What you have to decide is whether the price is worth the payoff."

Pepper looked down at the burnt skin around Tony's eyes; thought of what those eyes looked like when they were open, when they were focused entirely on a person. On her. She smiled.

"It's a pretty good payoff."

* * * * * * * * *

Everything hurt. Again. So, obviously he'd survived whatever happened this time.

“Tony?”

Pepper was here. How did she know? She hadn't answered the phone before--

“It’s likely to be a while before he’ll wake fully, Miss Potts." Didn’t know that voice. "The doctors think—”

_ maim _ takeno _ NEED _ want _ take _

Tony inhaled too deeply in shock at the stream of words invading his mind and sat up, coughing hard, feeling things shift that shouldn’t shift. Bones. Shouldn’t shift. 

Something was broken in his chest and he took long precious seconds just trying to breathe. He tried to convince the panicking part of himself that if he opened his eyes, he wouldn’t find himself hooked up to a car battery in the middle of the desert.

“Tony!” Pepper again. 

Where…? It took a very long moment for him to stop coughing. Long and painful.

“Let’s see if we can get him to lie back down.” Still didn't recognize that voice. Didn’t care, either. God, he hurt!

_ killmaim _ stop _ burn _ destroy

Words again. Something was broken in his  _ head _ . Breathing didn’t fix that.

"Get the doctor to check him out," Agent Hill. Definitely. Knew her. "We'll try to get him settled."

Tony finally caught the rhythm of breathing again and opened his eyes to dim light... and saw a blur. He blinked, opened them wider... and saw a blur. And his eyes  _ hurt _ . A lot. More than they had after the detonation flash through the wormhole...

“Um, I’m blind.” He was perversely proud of how matter-of-fact he sounded. He guessed it sort of stood to reason—the last thing he remembered before Clone Jarvis kicked him out was a hell of a bright light...

“You’re not, Tony,” Pepper—aka the blur—assured him quietly.

Tony felt the head of the bed he was in tilt up to meet his current sitting position but couldn’t relax enough to rest back on it. It was dark, Pepper was a blur, his eyes hurt unmercifully. “Pretty sure I am.”

“The HUD projectors blew out in the suit. The flare burned your corneas.” Pepper’s hand was in his, squeezing tight. “The doctors say they’ll heal in a few days. Until then…”

“I’m blind.” He tried and failed to take a deep breath, which hurt a lot more than it should have. He ignored it and breathed shallowly instead, mentally reviewing what he remembered, now that he was back in the present and thinking again. The sphere, the AI, Rogers, Jarvis...

_ maim _ HuRt _ kill _ helpBURN

“How’s Rogers?” The words came out too fast in the rush of whatever the hell he was hearing. The silence after he said them went on too long, though, and he hated not being able to read Pepper’s face.

“Pepper?” He drew out the question, concerned. He didn’t go through all this and still lose him, did he? His dad would’ve been pissed.

“Steve’s...” He heard her take a deep breath and clenched his jaw. Damn it.... “Steve’s in a coma. The doctors say there’s no higher brain activity. He’s breathing on his own for now, but he’s—.”

“No he’s not.” He wasn’t. Guppy hadn’t even had  _ lower _ brain activity. “Guppy Farrar—”

“Farrar is dead,” a secondary blob with Agent Hill’s voice put in. “His heart stopped last night about the same time the device did whatever it did to you and Captain Rogers. The team working on the sphere has theorized that without the device to sustain him, he couldn’t survive.”

Shit. That stood to reason. He’d trapped the AI in the suit, after all. It couldn’t keep Farrar alive from there. But Rogers was still breathing, for God’s sake. “He was awake at the scene,” he said roughly, sagging back against the bed finally. “He’s not gone.” Tony didn’t try to analyze why the idea of Steve Rogers being braindead bothered him so much. Except that it wasn’t right. Or fair. Or actually happening. “I need to see him.”

“Tony, you can’t—” Pepper bit down on her words as he ignored her and tried to slide his legs over the side of the bed.

_ Kill _ fightBURN _ hate _ lose

He was impressed with his own ability to bite back the scream that was trying to work its way out of the hamburger his chest seemed to have become. Again. Couldn’t he just break a leg like a normal person? Once?

“Stop it!” Pepper was pissed. At least she sounded pissed over the buzz in his brain. He was probably going to pass out here soon. “Damn it, Tony, you’re going to kill yourself!”

Again.

“You’ve got a concussion, broke three ribs, detached the reactor cuff from your sternum, and bruised a lung.” Her recitation of his injuries was relentless, and Tony sat stunned, more from the pain than the list of damages. He allowed her and Hill settle him back again. “Please? Can you just take care of yourself for one day?”

Tony didn’t think he really had one day. Not if they all thought Rogers was braindead. “Tell me more about Rogers’s condition,” he demanded, closing his seared eyes and trying to catch the rhythm of breathing again. “How long have I been out?”

“About twelve hours,” Hill offered promptly. “You’re on the medical floor at Triskelion.”

_ nowgone _ hatekillwant _ HURT _ take _ fight _

“Where is he?” God, what was up with the internal monologue of crazy?

“Next door,” she replied, a little less promptly. He could probably get next door. If he could get some good drugs. He took a shallow breath to gather his thoughts, opening his eyes and hissing at the pain both there and in his chest. Wasn’t quite the pain he’d felt in Afghanistan, but it was bad enough to white out his brain from time to time.

He was a little jealous of Rogers. A coma actually sounded pretty good right now.

Tony thought the situation over, trying not to rub at his eyes. A flash of painful light washed over him as the door opened, and he fought a brief battle with his own fear as an echo of the feeling of alien fingers in his brain made itself felt. Great—he was going to jump at doors opening now? 

"Mr. Stark," the advancing white blob said, in the voice of the guy who'd checked him over after New York, "It's Dr. Richardson.” Like any doctor, he of course started launching into a long speech about concussions and fractures and radiation and soft tissue damage and—

“Can I get the good drugs?” It was really a more important question than one might think—probably the most important one, right at the moment. Clearly he was going to be okay eventually. But right now, his eyes and chest hurt enough that he was having a hard time concentrating on anything else.

_ killstrike _ maim _destroy_ fall _ kill _

Well, except for the voices in his head, but hopefully the good drugs could take care of those, too. And then he could concentrate on what the hell had happened to Rogers and what he could do about it.

“Now you’re awake and coherent, we’ll get you some, yes. When you’re a little more recovered we’ll see about repairing your sternum where it attaches to the reactor cuff, but for now, you just need to rest and heal.”

“No, first, I need to see,” he said testily, moving on quickly because, really, RIchardson wasn’t a miracle worker. He rolled his head toward the Pepper blur. Moving his eyes at all didn’t seem to be working, he suddenly noticed. “And I need Jarvis.”

“You can’t turn the suit back on,” Hill said, an edge of irritation there, like he’d suddenly gone stupid. The Richardson blob moved to the other side of the bed and started taking vitals and things—whatever doctors did.

_ wheremaim _ BuRYkill _ findstop _ KilL

Tony shook his head and what little vision he had grayed out for a second. “The suit’s nothing but a hard drive now. I need a computer and a high speed uplink. Jarvis took off for the mainframe at Stark Tower after he cloned himself for the suit. I need him to work out how to safely access that data and try to figure out what the connection is between it and Rogers.”  _ And me _ , he didn’t mention. “Where’s the sphere?”

“It’s on Sub Six,” Hill answered. Good. Sub Six was an underground complex below Triskelion. Heavily shielded with about twenty security measures per lab. “It seems inert.”

“The suit’s there, too?” The blob that was Hill moved slightly and Tony didn’t have the time or the energy for tact. “Blind here. Words, please. Ow!” Richardson stepped back after giving him an annoyingly painful poke in the chest.

“Sorry, Mr. Stark,” Richardson said quietly. “Your injuries should heal well,” he allowed. “ _ If _ you take it easy and rest. The radiation exposure this time appears to have been minimal, but there are still concentrations of it that should dissipate in the next few days.” Tony didn’t shudder. He didn’t. Really, what was a little more radiation, right? “Because of your prior exposures, you’ll likely feel some minor effects of radiation sickness—”

“Headache, nausea, blah, blah, blah,” he broke in roughly. Didn’t need to hear this. It didn’t make any difference and it wasn’t like he hadn’t been through it before. “Anything else? Can I get the good drugs now?”

Richardson was probably pursing his lips at him in irritation, but Tony couldn’t see it, so it didn’t matter. “I’ll have some pain medication ordered for you,” the doctor agreed. “And an antinauseant as well. To make you more comfortable.”

_ killWAnt _ hatemaim _ DIE _ killdestroy

Oh yeah. He’d be comfortable any time now. Doctors were masters of saying stupid things. Richardson left and Tony wasn’t sorry to see him go.

“Where’s the suit, now?” he asked again, getting back to business. He really needed to see Rogers.

“Sub Six as well. We have it in a level five quarantine,” Hill told him. “But it hasn’t done anything, either.”

“It won’t,” he answered, sounding surprisingly confident to his own ears. He’d programmed the suit’s AI to commit suicide as soon as the data from the sphere was downloaded. Hopefully the total shutdown prevented the sphere’s AI from getting a foothold. “I’ll need everything there is on all of it, including Farrar and Rogers.”

“Tony,” Pepper said, treading lightly. “I know you have to get into this—I read the information you got at the scene and I know they need you—but you should try to take it easy.” Her blur moved a little and Hill’s blur moved a little and Tony figured maybe they were sharing some pseudosignificant look and it pissed him off, because he’d never been blind before and it pretty much sucked. “You were electrocuted when the suit overloaded and you were ejected.” Her voice shook. “Even with the reactor as a buffer, you coded twice before they got you stabilized.”

So, really dead, then. Again. Tony’s heart raced a little at the thought and at the month-old memory of falling frozen through alien space as his air ran out. He was embarrassed to hear the monitor pick up in time to his shock and he struggled to calm down, one hand resting on his aching chest.

“We think the energy surge through the arc reactor, coupled with the suit ejector, is what caused the broken bones,” Hill told him. 

“Good,” he tried to joke vaguely. “Thought maybe someone tried to give me chest compressions.” He couldn’t seem to move his hand, feeling the comforting hum of the reactor under his palm.

Dead. Again.

“It’s okay, Tony,” Pepper said, putting her hand over his. “ _ You’re _ okay, just… Don’t go too fast, all right?”

Tony nodded, sitting back.

_ maim _ killNeEd _ takeburn _

Yeah. Clearly, the situation wasn’t going to let him take anything slowly.

* * * * * * * * *

Contrary to what everyone seemed to think, Steve Rogers was fully conscious a lot of the time. The pain in his chest and back and arms was excruciating, and since nobody knew he was awake, they did nothing to make it better. He longed to kill them all for it some of the time, even though he knew from bitter experience that the painkillers wouldn’t work anyway.

It didn’t stop him from craving blood, and the desire was alien enough to start him fighting against it every time it surfaced.

At first he’d tried to call out, tried to find out what had happened to Tony Stark, whom he’d last seen flying lifeless from the back of his ruined suit as Steve tried to shove the gauntlet back onto it. As the anger and violence started to rise in him, he’d tried to find out where he was and what they were doing to keep people safe from him. But he couldn’t seem to form words, and increasingly, it was hard to even think about talking without losing some control.

And control was what he desperately needed.

He’d felt the strange disconnect as Stark tried to steal away the sphere’s entity from him. He’d fought to just let it go and let himself be saved, but the entity had hooked claws into him that still burned like molten iron.

His whole existence now seemed to be down to damming up the flow of thoughts and images, shoving it away. Almost like fighting off a barrage of gunfire with his shield.

His efforts were about as effective as a shovel in a mudslide.

Like one of Howard’s old learning machines or his son’s modern AIs, the alien sphere had molded its thoughts and images quickly into things he could understand—Hitler and Hydra, and wars and atrocities he’d only read about as he tried to catch up to the world he lived in now. It wanted him to take what he already knew and use it to kill. It wasn’t interested in teaching.

But it  _ was _ interested in showing, and the endless parade of death and torture had primed the soldier in him to want to fight. To  _ need _ to fight. After all, that was what he’d chosen to be turned into: a supersoldier. It would be easy to turn the entity loose, let it use him to tear the world around him to pieces.

So he buried himself as deeply as he could, hiding in a foxhole like he had in Bavaria with Falsworth while Sawyer tried not to bleed to death on them. Back then, he’d hidden because it was the only way to save the others—standing and fighting would have killed them all. Now, he thought that was doubly true. The alien entity was still concentrating on him, after all, trying to get him to give it control, since it couldn’t seem to take it alone. 

He wondered, in brief moments of silence, when he’d lose the battle. When would the entity force him out into the open? Use him to take over once and for all?

He found it hard to concentrate on the outside world with the repeated attacks of the entity’s thoughts, but Steve heard snatches during the troughs of the waves. He knew he’d been evaced to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, but he hadn’t heard Stark’s name mentioned, and what he heard about himself was hardly encouraging.

“... burns would need grafts in a normal person …”

“... been almost 24 hours and his brain waves are minimal ...”

“... his skull is just flooded with radiation ...”

“... says there’s still a danger …”

There was, and he was it. He was a danger to everyone and everything. It would be on Fury’s head when he lost control and killed them all, because the director should have locked him away when he had the chance. He could feel the soft bed beneath him and the worryingly light restraints. 

They thought he was in a coma or braindead or something, though why, he wasn’t quite sure. It didn’t matter—it was a dangerous move to let their guard down, and he prayed whatever was still building inside of him didn’t make them pay for it in blood.

Some of the time—brief moments that came and went with a semblance of regularity—he could think for himself, but the rest of the time, his thoughts were of chaos and violence and anger and hate. He fought as hard as he could against it all, but he knew it was just a matter of time before he succumbed.

So he played dead, afraid if he let himself move, even to speak, he wouldn’t be able to stop it taking over. It was all he could do to remain perfectly still when they came in to change the dressings on his burns or fiddle with his IV, fighting against the sphere’s injunction to keep everyone and everything away—presumably until he was finished being crafted into what it needed. He could snap them all like twigs if he let himself. He could kill. If he moved, he  _ would _ kill. Maim.

_ Stop! _ he begged for the millionth time, trying to breathe. Trying to calm himself. But it was out of his control and the thoughts came, unbidden, again. Unbidden and terrifying and real and almost his.

Towers falling, fields burning, men dying, screaming, bleeding....

Destroy.

Maim. Hurt. Kill.

_ NO! _ he screamed silently. He wasn’t this. As the hours went by he wasn’t sure what he was any more, but he wasn’t this.  _ No…. Help? _ Someone had to hear him...

But only the sphere answered.

_ Burn. _

* * * * * * * * *

_ to be continued... _


	4. Chapter 4

Tony had a headache that had nothing to do with his eyes—which were finally starting to at least distinguish blobs with better accuracy—or with the fact that he’d pretty much died again yesterday and his chest was in a few more pieces than it should be, or with the fact that he kept having to block out strings of random, alien, violent thoughts that came his way too frequently for his tastes.

No, Tony had a headache because he was sure he’d never concentrated on so much _talk_ in all his life. Every bit of information, every finding, every data point, had to be told to him. It was exhausting and he was having a hard time keeping it all straight—he'd developed three-dimensional interfaces for a reason, after all. He just didn't do data in words as well as he did data in space.

And he’d finally had to switch from Jarvis talking to him to Pepper talking to him because the AI’s voice kept soothing him into a daze.

The sphere was dead. Well, they were pretty sure the sphere was dead—they couldn’t actually be _sure_ sure until they got inside it. SHIELD’s best scientists were working on trying to open it up, but the outer shell was one solid piece of an alloy that was composed in part of vibranium—clearly the metal was more abundant on whatever world it had come from.

There were five tiny holes in the shell at what looked like random points, but fiber-optic cameras hadn’t gotten far down before hitting another barrier, though they did determine that the shell was probably about five inches thick. The only way in was to cut their way in, and that was proving difficult and time consuming. Lasers were ineffective and even an adamantium drill bit had to be stopped and cooled down from time to time. The etchings had yet to be deciphered—they could be anything from random doodles to an alien instruction manual.

The Mark VII suit was kept in a shielded room until Tony was able to come down and deal with it. He wasn’t sure it was safe to expose Jarvis to that data without some sort of buffer—that had been the whole reason behind the cloning in the first place (and Jarvis still seemed a little annoyed by that—or maybe by the fact that Tony had the clone kill itself). 

He had Jarvis building a virtual firewall around the Mark VII’s computer, but it would take time, since they had no idea how the alien data structures might function or what might happen if they let the damn thing out to play.

He just didn’t trust letting anyone else try to access it until he’d had a look and “having a look” really wasn’t an option right at the moment. Which just served to remind him—again—how much his eyes hurt.

 _Kill_ maimstop _destroyhURt_ kill _noburn_

“Tell me again,” he asked, closing his eyes as he endured the latest kill-kill onslaught. “What are Rogers’s findings?”

Pepper sighed. She’d told him four times already to give it up and go to sleep and now she was just being pissy. Okay, so she was also understandably freaked out that he was hearing voices, but he’d explained that it was probably just bleed-over from the alien data nearly downloading itself into his head, too.

Somehow that didn’t seem to make her feel better.

“He’s got baseline brainwave activity, but no higher level functioning,” she explained again. “No reaction to outside stimuli. The doctors said that his MRI shows ‘significant blood flow’ in a number of areas, but they think that’s more the way his system reacts to radiation. The radiation is ‘widespread and diffuse’ and at alarmingly high levels, though he’s emitting almost none.” 

Right. Bruce had once explained it as Steve’s body “metabolizing” the radiation the way his own body did, though the analogy wasn’t really that straightforward. And Steve’s body was breathing on its own, too. He had at least minimal activity. Farrar hadn’t even had that. In fact, almost none of his findings were like Farrar’s. It was no wonder everyone just jumped to the conclusion that he was braindead.

“But he’s got the same spikes that Guppy had?” Tony asked, grasping at straws. There had to be something….

“Yes. His are once every 67 seconds.”

Nice and regular. Like a computer pinging a host…

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered, sitting up a little straighter and whining at the pain of the movement. _Exactly_ like a computer pinging a host! But they weren’t getting any emissions from either the suit or the sphere. How was the AI communicating with him?

Tony thought it through. The alien sphere had started rewriting Rogers’s hard drive before Tony interrupted it, but it never had a chance to install the operating system—he should be a slave terminal, awaiting orders, like Farrar. But if Rogers had the strength to maintain some sort of DOS operating system of his own, generating minimal brain activity without constant input from the sphere, then maybe…

The AI clearly implanted a mandate to prevent someone or something from interrupting the transfer. _Don’t touch_ was probably the first subroutine it wrote onto any new hard drive. “Can people touch him without him throwing them across the room?”

Pepper paused. “Yes,” she drew out, clearly catching the significance of the question. Rogers wasn’t acting like a slave terminal at all. He wasn’t reacting solely based on the AI’s programming. He was _in there_ somewhere, still fighting the good fight.

“I need to see him,” Tony decided. He waved at his useless eyes. “Or, you know….” 

He sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed, reaching for the robe Pepper had brought him but hadn’t allowed him to use yet. Every movement served to remind him that his chest was connected to pretty much every part of his body and hurt like a bitch. Still, he was managing better than he had twelve hours ago. 

_maimkill_ diestrike _killfight_ diehurt _die_

He clenched his fists and tried to ignore it. He hurt more than he should and he was really sick of the words inserting themselves into his brain and he clearly did not have enough of the good drugs. If this was what Rogers had been going through in that field, it was no wonder the guy had thought they should kill him.

“Tony, you can’t—” Pepper started, but the protest sounded weak and she clearly knew it.

“I need to see him,” he repeated, easing carefully into the robe that was barely even a blur. At least he felt steady enough to stand and, hopefully, walk on his own. “He stayed conscious through the entire thing, Pepper,” he said quietly. “That’s gotta count for something. If he’s as tough as Dad thought he was, I’m betting he’s still in there somewhere.”

* * * * * * * * *

It had been too long, and Steve was weakening. He’d known it was inevitable. The constant barrage of violent thoughts that would have been alien even if spoken by a fellow human, the endless need to hold himself still against acting on them, the relentless energy battering at him in waves, even just the fact that he couldn't communicate without risking killing someone—it all added up to a truth that he was having difficulty facing.

Eventually, very soon in fact, he was going to lose control. Give in to the whispers that had become thoughts. Surrender to the images of killing and torture and mutilation and horror and sadism that revolved around him endlessly.

Hurt someone.

Kill someone.

The part of him that was still Steve Rogers would rather die than let it happen, but that part was dwindling. He actually found himself wishing Hill had called in the airstrike before it got to this point—just killed him outright. The blatantly suicidal thought was the least alien one to occupy his mind. If it _was_ his mind anymore. He couldn’t fight this much longer. Couldn’t fight himself.

“... freaks me out. He should have died ...”

The voice of someone in the room floated past his barriers and he longed to respond, but knew he couldn't. He was alone in a room filled with targets. He’d given up hours ago trying to figure a way out of this, figure a way to communicate without losing his hold on himself. He was adrift on his own and unable to escape. Now he just wanted it to end.

He clenched his jaw as someone lightly touched his arm, peeling back the dressings on excruciating burns that had long since become the least painful thing in his life. Don’t move, he told himself. Don’t kill… Don’t.

Yes. In a perfect world, he probably should have died. It would have been better for everyone.

He set himself, feeling the rise of anger and pain that signalled another attack, and fought not to kill whoever was gently caring for the body he knew would soon be a weapon for whatever was trying to take him over.

If he were normal, he told himself bitterly once the wave passed him by, he’d’ve given up long ago and let it take over, but he still instinctively fought to shore up the dam. Like he was somehow intent on prolonging his own pain.

But for now, he floated in the trough between the waves—the calm before the next cresting foam of thoughts on who and how and what he could kill and maim.

“...Stark is working on it…”

Howard would figure it out if anyone could, he thought dazedly. No. No, not Howard. Howard was dead. His son—brash and arrogant, like Howard in too many ways and not enough like him in others—Tony. Tony, who wasn't dead yet. Tony, whose suit had a vulnerable point just under the left side of the chin where he could work his shield in and pry the helmet off and kill him himself—

_God…_

He’d lived his life fighting the good fight. He just wasn’t sure he could fight it any longer, and he hated that realization. All he’d ever wanted was to strike back at the evil he saw too much of around him—the evil the sphere seemed intent on shoving down his throat.

He was frighteningly close to becoming something even less human than the super soldier he’d given himself over to so many years ago. Soon he’d be nothing more than a killing tool, a repository of knowledge about how man could kill man. As if they needed a manual... 

> _“_ _It’s all about patterns, Captain.... If we know_ why _they kill, maybe we can stop them_ before _they kill.”_

Stop. 

> _“_ Homo sapiens _have the largest brain capacity of any animal on Earth. Computers that take up rooms can be stored in a human mind._ ”

Who had told him that?

He tried to capture the memory, but the next wave came too quickly, drowning him in pain and the familiar refrain of random, relentless violence...

* * * * * * * * *

The world went disturbingly darker for Tony, as Pepper surrendered to the inevitable and slipped a pair of sunglasses over his eyes to protect them from the hallway lights. Gently, she took his arm to lead him from the room. “If—and it’s a big if— _if_ he’s really in there, what makes you think _you_ can get through to him?”

Tony really didn’t like the heavy doubt in her voice. “Why couldn’t I?”

“You and Steve don’t exactly see eye to eye on… anything.”

 _killhurt_ PrY _killfight_ hate _strikehow_ kill _sapienshurt_ kill

Tony ignored the latest burst of hate and frustration—he was almost getting used to them now, and the taste of ground teeth they left in his mouth—and focused on Pepper’s words. Yeah, there it was again. _Steve._ “Why is it you’re on a first name basis with him?” he asked, the absent jealousy at least something normal to latch onto. The hall they stepped out into was just so many blurry and flashing snapshots and he was disoriented even with her arm in his and a shoulder sliding along the wall.

“I’m on a first name basis with everyone, Tony,” she said with a grin in her voice. “It’s called being friendly.” She guided him to the next door and opened it.

“I’m friendly,” he defended himself, glad the walk had been so short as they entered another darkened hospital room and he gazed into yet more blurriness. “Just don’t get too… friendly.”

Huh.

Steve Rogers lay in a hospital bed with burn gauze covering his torso and neck and both arms down to the fingers. His face was completely expressionless but his jaw held a tension that, to Tony, was obvious. The bed was no more than a blur of white and gray. Steve Rogers, however, was… clearer. Not clear, really, but...

“Okay,” Tony drawled, freaked out but perversely glad to be able to see _something_.

“What?” Pepper asked.

He pulled off the sunglasses he didn’t need in the low light and looked up to see a now-familiar blurry image of the woman he loved. And yet he could almost-clearly see a guy he frankly kind of resented on occasion and wasn’t even sure he technically liked a lot of the time. Hardly seemed fair.

“Just… Give me a minute.” He let go of her arm and walked forward with confidence—and slammed painfully into the end of Rogers’s bed. “Son of a bitch!”

Rogers flinched.

“Did you see that?” Tony asked, trying to breathe through the pain and looking from the nearly clear face that had just twitched to the unclear face of his fiancée behind him.

“See what, Tony?” she asked, stepping up and taking his arm to support him. He leaned on her, looking at Rogers carefully.

“Watch him,” he said. “Hey Cap?” he called quietly. Rogers flinched again. His jaw tightened.

“What am I watching for?” Pepper asked, worry coloring her tone.

“You don’t…?” Okay. She didn’t see it. So, that meant… What? Clearly, he was seeing this because they were both connected to the alien sphere. Like the pings he “heard”.

“Rogers, I know you’re awake in there.”

This time there was no physical response. But what if …? Was the AI maybe not as in control as he thought? Was Rogers awake in there—just unable to respond because the sphere kept reasserting its control with every ping? Was it suppressing him completely, or was it just preventing him from making contact?

“Tony, what’s going on?”

He ignored Pepper’s question and asked one of his own. “When was the last blip on his EEG?” How the hell was he thinking in there, if he was at all? Clearly he could hear—respond at least to volume...

“Looks like he had one just a few seconds ago,” she replied, annoyed at his lack of explanation. “Tony—”

He looked at the blob that was arguably the smartest woman he’d ever met. “I think he’s awake in there, and I think the AI keeps needing to reassert its control.” Her hand tightened on his arm and Tony knew she’d figured it out. 

He studied the face of the man before him; a face he’d known in comic books and old photos for as long as he’d been alive. His dad had thought the world of this guy, and Tony had to admit, he had guts. Uptight as all hell, but he had guts. They just had to hope he had enough fight in him to throw out the alien program, if they could figure out how to do it.

“He pinged,” a random voice murmured softly. Tony hadn’t even known anyone else was in the room.

The clenched jaw he’d seen as he walked in the door was gone now, smoothed away by the AI, no doubt. “Rogers?”

Nothing.

 _killdie_ killLouD _pain_ hopekill

Tony shook his head at the delayed onslaught—he’d have to time how long after the AI ping his own pings were coming—and looked into Rogers’s face again. “Captain Rogers?” Again, nothing.

“Come on, Steve-o!” he called at his most annoying. Definitely needed to start keeping a log. See how long it took Rogers to return. “Rise and shine!” Not a twitch. Damn.

His eyes burned even more if he didn’t blink for too long, so Tony held them closed a moment, slouching a little in pain before opening them again. He turned his stiff, aching body in a circle just to get some movement going—and stopped dead, barely breathing, staring at another man he could see in that nearly clear way.

“Pepper?” he asked, sure he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing. Or at least sure that seeing what he was seeing was a sign he’d gone completely around the bend. “You don’t… see my dad over there in the corner, do you?”

“What?” Okay, so Pepper was clearly subscribing to the around the bend theory. Not unbelievable, really.

Tony blinked his painful eyes, but his dad was still there. Huh. Visual hallucinations. He supposed having your eyeballs fried fell under "variations in vision". Or maybe it was the drops they were using to paralyze his eye muscles so the corneas could heal...

He let go of Pepper and walked toward it carefully, studying the vision. Dad had a smile on his face, a spaghetti nest of wires in his hand. The Howard Stark facing him was younger than Tony had ever seen him in life, though. Much younger. His dad had been well into middle age by the time Tony had known him, but the apparition in front of him didn’t look much older than Rogers did…

“It’s the way _Rogers_ remembers him,” Tony whispered. He turned away from the ghost, most of the pain in his chest forgotten, and headed back to the bed again, nearly tripping over a cart carrying one of the medical staff’s computers. He pointed to it without turning to look—he couldn’t see anything, anyway. “I need video feeds and data streams from the suit and the sphere on that. Now.” 

He felt and heard someone move in behind him, fingers immediately tapping away at the keyboard he could barely distinguish. He had eyes only for Rogers. How the hell was the entity communicating? How the hell was _Rogers_ communicating?

“Can we get an fMRI on him? We’ll need constant monitoring.” His brain kicked into overdrive. He was seeing images from Rogers’s mind, so the guy clearly wasn’t comatose _or_ brain dead. Why no electrical activity, then?

“You’re in there, aren’t you?” he asked, watching for any sign that Rogers was hearing him. “Why my dad, huh?” he wondered, half to the captain and half to himself. He looked over at the corner again, but the vision was gone. “What could he possibly have to do with this? Or are you just in free association mode?”

* * * * * * * * *

Steve was jolted out of a rare moment of blankness by a voice louder and clearer than any he’d heard in far too long.

“Son of a bitch!” 

He flinched at the volume.

Stark? Tony. Not Howard. Howard was dead.

> _”It was just for a minute.” Howard took too long to start breathing again after the shock, but he was already trying to escape the gurney, his fear of doctors worse than his fear of death. “I’m fine.”_

“Did you see that?” Tony again.

Steve didn’t move. He could rip out Tony's arc reactor and let him die of heart failure—no. No fun in that. There were better ways to kill him, but he’d have to bide his time… Steve ground his teeth, trying not to think those thoughts.

“Hey, Cap?”

The voice was loud again, and Steve used it to drag himself back from the murderous meanderings that were his existence now. Tony would protect the others from him, wouldn’t he?

“Rogers, I know you’re awake in there.”

Steve would have cried out if he could let himself move. Stark was talking _to_ him. The contact was an almost physical pain, somehow. But, maybe there was hope after all.

He could still kill him with one hand.

He tried to reject the thought that was not his own. Tony was a friend, not...

Steve held himself still while the wave crested over. Images of a red and gold body falling from the sky melted into other bodies falling melted into fire and clouds of debris in the streets…

“You’re in there, aren’t you?”

The words called him back.

Steve fought the urge to speak. Stark was here, he reminded himself, the knowledge having been momentarily forgotten in the wave of hate. He’d figure this out. He’d find a way to stop Steve from hurting anyone—killing anyone.

Or he could be dead—Tony was here now, and Steve could just let go, could just reach out and kill him—

No. NO. Stark would help him. He would help him or Steve would kill him or….

_God, just make it stop!_

* * * * * * * * *

_to be continued..._


	5. Chapter 5

“Ping,” Pepper called out softly.

“Yeah, put an audible on that, would you?” Tony asked, gripping the side rail on the bed and waiting for the next databurst. 

_stopkill_ dead _herekill_ help _help_ kill _STOP_

 _Stop._ Tony snorted at his own stupidity. “I’ll be damned.” He’d been _hearing_ Rogers the whole time, he just hadn’t been listening. “Notepad—or something.” As Pepper hastily handed him a clipboard, he tried to see her clearly and failed, explaining shortly, “The pings are him. At least part of them, anyway.”

He wrote down the words that had flown through his head: _Stop, kill, dead, here, kill, help, help, kill. Stop._ He wondered whether Rogers was actually trying to communicate or just leaking out. Stupid—Tony should have paid more attention to the damn pings instead of trying to ignore them.

What was the last one? _Kill, die, kill, loud, pain, hope, kill…_ Wow. He hoped Rogers could hear him. The guy clearly needed to know someone was out here trying to help.

“I can hear you, Steve,” he whispered, trying to sound comforting. Mostly, he was trying not to imagine being in Rogers’s shoes. “Well, sort of.” Trapped in his own mind with the alien thing that had tried to card its fingers through Tony’s brain out in that field...

He shuddered and reached out to lay a hand on Steve’s leg, feeling really uncomfortable, but afraid to touch the burns on the guy’s upper body. He didn't feel the muscles under his fingers bunch but he thought he saw them. Rogers let out a slightly deeper breath that might have been a moan if it had more power behind it. How the hell was Rogers managing this? There was some piece here that Tony was missing.

“Just hang on, okay? We’ll figure this out.”

“Ping,” Pepper murmured, seconded by a quiet chime from the computer. 

“The sphere and suit were both silent,” the faceless blob in the room added.

Tony counted down in his head, closing his eyes to give them a momentary break from the pain. He felt worse now than he had when he walked in the door, his legs shaking with exhaustion. He should probably think about getting some sleep sometime soon.

 _killstop_ kill _fight_ DoNtTouCh _stopme_ kill _hurtdestroy_

Tony pulled his hand from Rogers’s leg carefully and saw Steve’s whole body relax. “All right,” he told him. “No touchy. Got it.” He stepped back, his knees colliding with a chair someone was just setting into place for him.

Easing painfully into the seat, he wrote the ping’s words but paused on _stop, me, kill…_

“You’re still gonna fight in there though, right?” he asked, trying to figure out how exactly they could come out of this with a living, breathing, sane-as-he-ever-was Captain America. “We’re all looking for a way out that doesn’t include a twenty-one gun salute, aren’t we?”

The imaging equipment was being rolled into the room and he looked past the unreadable blur of incoming medical personnel to see two clear men on the other side of the bed. One was short, older, kindly—he looked worried and Tony recognized him. Erskine, the superserum creator. The other was his dad again, looking eager. Why Dad? Why him? It didn’t seem to make any sense...

A white-clad blob detached itself from the group setting up the equipment and stood before him.

“Mr. Stark? I’m Dr. Halburt. I’m a neurologist, and I’ll be doing the monitoring on Captain Rogers.”

Tony nodded. Halburt had done the initial work ups when they came in. “He’s not brain dead.” 

“So I hear,” the doctor said, a surprising openness in his tone. In Tony’s experience, doctors pretty much believed what they believed and nothing else mattered. “I’m hoping we can find out how he’s communicating without using any electrical impulses. I’m also interested in the pings I’m told you’re receiving from him,” he continued, consulting a box in his hand. Tony couldn’t possibly decipher what the hell it was with his eyes so completely screwed. “The electrical spikes appear to correspond to miniscule pulses of near-gamma radiation that he’s emitting.”

Well that made sense. Near-gamma was the dominant radiation the sphere had been putting out. According to the initial scans they’d done, it was the majority of the radiation that was flooding Rogers’s brain and working on turning Tony’s stomach inside out. Speaking of which, he’d have to get more of whatever cocktail they’d given him earlier, before he hurled—he somehow thought the skull-crushing headache wouldn’t appreciate that.

He ignored his discomfort and tried to concentrate on the _important_ problem at hand. Radiation was an incredibly inefficient medium for information transfer. The alien sphere couldn’t have been using it all this time. When it decayed, radiation didn’t do it linearly—the data would be warped by the degradation of the signal after not much more than a week or two at that frequency…

“Scan the full spectrum,” he told Halburt, looking up at the brown-faced blur, unable to get a read on the guy because he couldn’t see a damn thing. He hated this. He felt like he was shackled again—hooked to a car battery, trapped with poison in his chest… Tony took a deep breath, staving off the hysteria and reminding himself again that the blindness _should_ be temporary. “We’re missing something here,” he mused quietly, as the computer chimed in the background. “Something else is going on.”

 _last_ fighttired _hitstop_ hear _hard_

He looked at Rogers, who seemed particularly lifeless at the moment. He couldn’t give up on him. Hell, seventy years ago, Steve Rogers had been dead and frozen at the bottom of the ocean for all the world knew, and Dad hadn’t given up on him then. The least Tony could do was live up to the old man’s memory, right?

“Give me a clue about Dad, okay?” he asked, looking at the vague skitterings on his clipboard that were supposed to be that latest stream of words. He hoped they’d be legible to someone, since he was relying on muscle memory and writing blind.

He suddenly hated that expression.

* * * * * * * * *

“Being able to see would be really helpful right about now,” Tony griped with a touch of fear to his voice. He closed his eyes and sat back stiffly.

Pepper looked down at him. He was beyond exhausted at this point but she knew he wouldn’t sleep. If he was right and Steve was trying to communicate through the pings that only Tony could hear, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. He was Steve’s only link to the world now. He couldn’t leave him trapped in there.

Another “or worse” to add to the collection.

Without opening his eyes, Tony raised his hand and barely waved at the clipboard in his lap.

“If any of that is readable, label the first one ping 2 and the second one ping 1 and put all four of them in a running log for me.” He smiled up at her and she flinched again at the random vacancy in his eyes. They would heal. They _would_.

Even without his vision, though, he could still puppy-dog her. “Please?”

She took the paper from him, snorting in amusement. He’d never change, thank God. She sobered as she opened a text window and typed in the seemingly random streams of words:

> `Ping 1`
> 
> `kill die kill loud pain hope kill`
> 
> `Ping 2`
> 
> `stop kill dead here kill help help kill stop`
> 
> `Ping 3`
> 
> `kill stop kill fight don't touch stop me kill hurt destroy`
> 
> `Ping 4`
> 
> `last fight tired hit stop hear hard`

_Stop me._ Pepper stared at the words of the last two pings. _Tired._ Steve must be terrified in there. She looked down at Tony, who shook his head hard, blinking sightless eyes and trying to keep awake. She amended her thought. They were both terrified in their own ways.

“You should eat,” she said quietly. Tony quirked his lips and his face took on an unpleasant green. She wondered if she should ask the doctor for something for his stomach again and squeezed his shoulder in understanding. “Okay. Never mind. I guess I won’t ask you to sleep again, either, then.”

“Okay, good, because we don’t need a lovers’ spat right now,” he joked, trying so hard to act normal. “So public and messy—”

Pepper Potts, girlfriend extraordinaire, would do what she could to help. She swatted him gently on the back of the head and he yelped. “Hey! Concussion here!” he murmured. But a small smile played around his lips. She grinned. Mission accomplished.

Maria Hill slipped into the room, her eyes settling uneasily on the form on the bed as the imaging equipment was hooked up to him. Pepper understood—she didn’t look at Steve if she didn’t have to. Tony had said he’d seen Steve twitch and flinch, but to her, he looked utterly lifeless.

“We’re working on it, okay, Cap?” Tony muttered. “We’ll figure it out.”

Maria caught her eye and nodded toward the corner. Pepper slipped away from Tony’s back, though she doubted he’d’ve noticed if they’d had the conversation right in front of him.

“The Director wants an update,” Hill said quietly. “I filled in what I could, but he wants to speak to Stark.” The look on her face told Pepper she knew exactly what the answer to that would be.

“He won’t leave,” Pepper confirmed. “He _shouldn’t_ leave. He should be in a bed of his own, but when has common sense ever had anything to do with it?” He looked worse than he had when they came in, the strain of being upright and conscious showing on him.

“Price of heroism, right?” Maria asked, an understanding smile on her face.

Pepper watched Tony sit up abruptly, hissing in pain as he wrote another stream of words on the notepad. “The price of stupidity is more like,” she said. 

Maria got a strange look on her face. “Clearly the Director’s line doesn’t work for everyone,” she muttered inexplicably. She smiled to herself and nodded to Pepper. “I’ll let him know. He has a meeting with the Security Council about the New York incident in thirty minutes. I expect he’ll be down here after that.”

Pepper nodded her understanding, turning her attention back to Tony. She only hoped he was up to Fury’s grilling at that point.

“Also, Dr. Banner’s been in touch.” She pursed her lips. “Apparently he just received a time-delayed email Mr. Stark sent yesterday. He’s concerned.”

Bruce. Pepper sighed. He and Tony had developed a fast friendship after New York. Nick Fury had, surprisingly, been as good as his word and had buried Bruce’s location, throwing interested parties off the scent. Between S.H.I.E.L.D. hiding his location and Tony’s own security, Bruce was safe on Stark Tower’s eighty-seventh floor, where the rebuilt lab area had been remodeled to provide him a suite of rooms as well. A home. Where he needed to stay.

“Tell Bruce to stay put and I’ll call him,” Tony put in from across the room, proving Pepper wrong about his tunnel vision. “And tell Fury I’ll get to him when I get to him.”

Pepper watched him stare at Steve for a long moment, frozen until the ping alarm went off. He sighed and, after a few more moments, wrote something more on the clipboard before dropping the pen into his lap. He was spent.

“We’ll give the Director an update when we can,” Pepper said. “Right now, I’m going to see if I can get Tony to let Richardson take another look at him.”

* * * * * * * * *

If they could kill him, it could stop. Steve remembered waking after he’d crashed Schmidt’s plane. He remembered darkness and ice and knowing how hard he was to kill and cursing Erskine for the privilege of living forever. He knew now it didn’t have to be forever.

It didn’t even have to be today.

“I can hear you, Steve.” Tony. Stark could do it. He could find a way—hell, all he needed was the weapons on his suit and some perseverance. And Tony heard him. The sound of Stark’s voice seemed to anchor Steve as nothing else had.

> _”Steven?” Dr. Erskine. The tank. Worried. Another anchor in a storm. “Can you hear me?”_

“Well, sort of.” 

> _”Don't speak.” Howard. The Sapience Project. Like a kid with a new toy. “Just think. It’ll hear you.”_

Reality was slipping again… Back into place now— _his_ reality, where yesterday and today were literally years apart. He felt a frisson of hope. If only for a moment.

“Just hang on, okay?” Tony asked.

Steve tried to muster the courage he’d always thought he had in such abundance. He had to find a way to hang on. It was what he’d done all his life, right? Hang on, fight back.

A hand dropped onto his leg and Steve fought down a scream—

**_Don’t touch!_ **

The warmth of that hand was all he could feel physically, but the urge to kill was still there, still strong, still slowly driving him over a line he could not cross. If he let go of his control, even just a little, he would break that arm and work his way up.

No. He could hold on. Stark heard him. Maybe… maybe just one word? One sentence even? Maybe he could manage that much. “Stop me,” he tried to whisper.

But before he could be sure he’d said it, the wave crested again. There was no answer, just the endless, unbearable, hopeless cascade of _kill_ and _hurt_ and _destroy._

The hope drained away as quickly as it had come. He didn’t know how much more he was expected to take. Again, words spoken quietly pulled him back. The hand was gone and he missed it—but he silently thanked Stark for understanding how close to the edge he was.

“You’re still gonna fight in there though, right?” Tony sounded worried and somehow, that surprised him. “We’re all looking for a way out that doesn’t include a twenty-one gun salute, aren’t we?”

Steve felt a kind of bitter amusement at the question. Of course he was going to fight. Exhausted and battered though he was, he was going to fight. Because he’d always done what had to be done. Because it was all he knew how to do.

Or maybe Bucky had been right. Maybe he just liked being hit.

“Give me a clue about Dad, okay?” Steve didn’t know why Howard was so on his mind. But _he’d_ been a hard man to like at first, too. It obviously ran in the family. So did taking stupid risks, and Steve couldn’t help but think that Tony staying anywhere near him was just that, especially when so much of the thing he was becoming wanted to tear Stark apart.

Still, bolstered by the fact that he wasn’t alone anymore, trying to claw his way back to that moment of seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, Steve struggled to figure out how to communicate, how to drag himself out of this pit. Another wave crashed over him, dark and unrelenting, but this time a memory brought him back, a voice light and cheerful and full of enthusiasm.

> _”Just think.”_

As simple as that, Howard?

 _I’ll fight,_ he thought carefully, praying Tony could hear him. _If you can find me a target._

“We’re working on it, okay, Cap?” he heard Stark mutter as if in answer. He sounded almost as exhausted as Steve felt. “We’ll figure it out.”

Steve mentally gritted his teeth as a pressure rose again in his mind, knowing what was coming and trying to brace himself against the wave of horror.

 _Hang on,_ he told himself, blocking out the thoughts and images better than he’d ever managed to. They still crashed over him with a burst of death and pain and horror, but now he had a voice to hold on to, like a shield in his hand. A directive…

_Just hang on._

* * * * * * * * *

Maria hadn’t been gone more than fifteen minutes—just long enough to call upstairs and report to the Director—but she still took a deep breath before re-entering room 4502. Fury hadn’t been pleased with her announcement that Stark wouldn’t leave the room, but he didn’t seem particularly surprised by it, either.

Nor was he surprised when Maria suggested that she stay down here to “monitor the situation.” She found a spot along the wall and smiled briefly at Pepper, watching Halburt and his people finish calibrating the scanning equipment.

“Jarvis, have you figured out how it’s broadcasting to him without emitting… well, anything, really?” Stark was sniping. He’d sound like his normal self if there wasn’t such a heavy current of pain and exhaustion in the words. 

She’d checked with Richardson, who’d been walking out of the room as she approached, and she knew Stark had been given another round of drugs that only seemed to scratch the surface of his problems. The radiation levels in his brain weren’t high, but they weren’t getting any lower, either, and his unwillingness to lie down and recover wasn’t helping his physical injuries. “He’s stayed upright through sheer cussedness,” was Richardson’s assessment, and Maria didn’t disagree.

“I _am_ working on it, sir,” the AI’s voice scolded Stark through the laptop’s speakers. Maria had to wonder why he surrounded himself with people and machines as sarcastic and biting as he was—seemed like they’d be competition. Maybe he just liked being scolded. She smiled to herself. More knowledge she didn’t need.

“Well, work harder,” he snapped back absently, his eyes never leaving Rogers. “What am I paying you for?”

“I don’t believe I _am_ being paid, sir,” Jarvis replied. If he was a human being, she’d say he was deliberately setting up a punch line.

“Stark Tower keeps you lit, that’s payment enough. Now figure it out.”

The screen on the fMRI began drawing Rogers’s brain as the “ping chime” sounded on the computer, and Maria waited with everyone else. It was beyond weird that Stark and Captain Rogers, of all people, were connected like this.

“Calibrating for broad-spectrum radiation,” Halburt murmured. “Let’s see what we find here…”

Maria looked at the image that appeared, line by line, on the screen, watching Halburt frown at the result while her ears cataloged Stark’s blind and amused comment to whatever he’d “heard” from Rogers.

“I’ll find you a target, Cap,” Stark said, mostly asleep by appearances, and completely unaware of the astonished knot of people watching the scanner’s screen. “Betting I won’t want to see it when you’re done with it, though, huh?”

Maria watched the numbers beside the scan, trying to understand them given her nonexistent knowledge of neurology. The scan itself didn’t look like the MRI pictures you saw on the Discovery Channel at all—it looked like circuitry; patches of orange and yellow concentrations, connected by pulsing red trails....

“Is the sphere actually storing information via radiation in his brain?” One of the techs asked in a whisper. “Can something even _do_ that?”

“Oh my God,” Halburt finally murmured, his voice a strange mixture of fascination and horror. Stark reacted to it immediately, startling from his doze and jumping to his feet. He slammed into the hospital bed right in front of him and gasped painfully just once before he stopped breathing altogether. Maria had a sudden reminder of the third, or maybe the fourth time he’d stopped breathing while she was waiting for med-evac to get to them.

“What?” he called weakly after a long moment, holding his chest and breathing again. Pepper was at his side in a second, holding him up. He looked up at her testily. “If he’s going to do that, at least help me over there so I don’t break any more bones.”

“Sorry,” Pepper said, sounding as absently apologetic as her fiancé normally did. She hooked his arm in hers and lead him across to the screen that showed a brain that apparently should not be able to look like that.

“It’s filtered for X-rays and higher,” Halburt told him.

“Can you focus enough on the screen?” Pepper asked in an undertone.

Maria wondered at how hard it must be for him to focus at all, since the doctors had given him drops that paralyzed the tiny muscles responsible for such a maneuver. He stiffened, though, so he clearly saw something.

“I think I’ve built a circuit board just like that before,” was his laconic response. The horror under his words was unmistakable.

“We’re reading crazy blood flow throughout the interior gyra but no correlative electrical activity,” Halburt explained in shock, adjusting the display to show another area of the brain in question. “Neurons are being excited by the radiation itself, at a wavelength of .972 angstroms... I don’t know how that’s possible, but it’s obviously why it didn’t translate on the EEG.”

“That’s how it transferred the data?” Pepper asked, squeezing his arm.

Stark nodded. “Inefficient as hell, but effective in the short term—and faster than transferring via electrical impulses. It didn’t need the computing power yet, just the space.” He leaned against Pepper more heavily and frowned. “Damn it. It downloaded the data as fast as it could so it could start figuring out how to use his electrical system to stabilize it.”

Maria straightened in alarm. Things were going to get worse, then. Much worse. If Stark was right then the sphere might have succeeded in downloading itself into the captain’s brain completely after all—it was just teaching itself how to work the existing structures. Maybe it was designed to give itself time to learn the brain topography of a new host species.

Whatever the case, Maria had a sudden realization that the restraints they currently had on Rogers weren’t going to be enough.

* * * * * * * * *

_to be continued..._


	6. Chapter 6

“I need a second security detail in here,” Tony heard Hill say. Yeah. Security was good. Stronger restraints were even better. “And we need a full-body restraint in place, now.”

“We can’t use a full body net, ma’am,” a magenta-haired, dark-skinned blob in blue scrubs protested, her voice worried and tentative. “His burns—”

“If we need the restraints, he’s not going to notice the burns,” Tony snapped, pissed at the situation and at himself for failing to find a way out of it. If they needed the restraints, Steve Rogers would already be dead in every important way.

Tony tried to calculate how much data had already been downloaded into Rogers’s brain. He needed to get into the Mark VII, eyesight or no eyesight. Clearly the sphere and the suit really _were_ both silent, and the data in Rogers’s head was more complete than he’d thought. If it figured out it was on its own and it had the kind of redundancies that a human-based worm or trojan would have, it would eventually just write its own operating system from scratch. And that would pretty much be the end of this whole party.

The computer across the room chimed softly and Tony glanced at Rogers’s bed. Six, five, four, three, two, one—

 _kill_ containthreat _hateburn_ lockkill _cant_

Tony found the clipboard suddenly in his hands, and he jotted down the words quickly. Pepper took the clipboard from him, adding them to her list, along with the previous burst that had included the clear phrase “find me target.” He wondered how much time they had to figure out how to aim Rogers at that target before the proverbial bomb in his head went off.

“We just had a brief flicker in area 6. Electrical, not radiative,” a voice reported from the maddening blur around him. Shit. Not much time at all, then. Area 6 was part of the motor cortex, specifically the part that dealt with coordinated movement. The AI was trying to move him. Or he was trying to move...?

“Can you move, Cap?” he asked, turning away from the blob of a brain scan that looked more like a motherboard. Rogers, not unexpectedly, gave no answer.

Tony looked up past the head of the bed as clear images formed, taking a moment to figure out what Rogers was showing him this time. Did he have some conscious control over the images, too, or were they random? Based on stray thoughts and memories? They didn't seem to have anything to do with the violence of the pings he was sending out. Maybe they were a defense mechanism—escapism for a mind that was being bombarded...

His dad was still there, but in place of Erskine was a young, handsome man in a trim leather jacket and Army-issue trousers. Bucky Barnes, Tony remembered. This time, beyond the two men was the ghost of a room filled with row upon row of tables, all covered in vacuum tube-dotted circuit boards.

Circuit boards… Did Rogers understand what was happening? Was that what he was trying to say?

“Where are you?” Tony murmured, mostly to himself. Rogers probably wasn’t _showing him_ these images—they’d make more sense if he was—but they had to mean something. “Dad, Erskine, Barnes, and a room full of first-gen computer…”

Probably the connection between them was just picking up whatever floated through Rogers’s brain as the ping shot out, like dust trailing after a comet. Given Rogers’s radiation spikes and how increasingly crappy Tony’d felt since he walked in the door here, he now had an idea of how that connection worked. Richardson and Halburt had their suspicions, too, he’d bet. He'd have to get Pepper out of the room for a while to confirm it, though.

A panic attack for another time, he guessed. Those were sure piling up. God, he was going to end up being his own nightlight at this rate—or dying before he was fifty. He tried to refocus and slow his racing heart. The visions… Concentrate on the visions...

His dad probably kept appearing because he himself was here, reminding Rogers of the Stark family name. He’d mentioned Steve’s altered physiology a couple of times, he was sure, which would make Rogers think of Erskine. Bucky Barnes? Well, he _was_ Steve's best friend. Tony knew Pepper and Happy and Rhodey had floated through _his_ head in the hell that was that cave in the desert. Even as he fell through the wormhole, he—

He shook his head while stilling the shaking in his hands. _Not the time. Not the time…_

What about the room, though? Well, Captain America was kind of a fossil. While Tony knew Rogers used modern-day computers, he was still from a generation where a top-of-the-line “computing machine” could take up a couple of rooms. Maybe it was the only way for him to understand what was happening to him.

Tony closed his eyes and fought the battle against rubbing them for the four millionth time since he’d woken up blind. He’d get better. He would. He should actually thank Rogers—at least _his_ life-and-death struggle took Tony’s mind off a paltry little thing like the possibility of not being able to see clearly for the rest of his life.

He pushed it away and refocused. Again. It was getting harder to think and he hoped that was just exhaustion and not fallout—forgive the pun—from the radiation in his brain. Rogers and Barnes and Dad and Erskine… Hell, maybe the guy’s mind was just wandering. 

_Mine is, too,_ he thought, as the chime sounded again and he opened his eyes. The phantom room was gone. Of course—the AI was trying, again, to erase the hard drive and reinitialize. Eventually, the wipe would stick. Time to get back to work while it made a difference.

“Jarvis,” he snapped, counting down in his head. “How much data was downloaded into the Mark VII?"

“Data load is estimated at 15.2 petabytes,” Jarvis said after a moment.

Huh. Less than he’d’ve thought. If that was the real load and not some sort of compression, and if he could estimate the amount of gray matter that would take up, maybe they could somehow—

No _wontmove_ killcant _stop_ lock _sapienstalk_ pleaselock

The face of the bed-bound man before him twitched. Steve’s hands balled into fists for a brief second before relaxing.

Damn, Tony thought, seriously impressed. Rogers was stopping the AI from using him. Somehow, he was strong enough to reject the commands to move. He wouldn’t be able to do it forever—the program was already using more of his brain than he was—but for now, it gave them time.

“Did he just move?” Maria Hill’s voice came from the blur around him. Huh. Hadn’t even known she was here.

"Hold on a little longer, okay, Captain?" Tony whispered, though he wasn’t really sure what he was asking the man to hold on _for_. He wasn't quite at a loss as to what to do, but he was getting closer than he liked.

> _"Sometimes there isn't a way out, Tony."_

The memory of Rogers’s words blindsided him and his own hands balled into fists. "Not this time," he murmured. They’d lost Phil Coulson to one alien asshole. They weren’t losing Steve Rogers, too.

Pepper placed the clipboard back in his hand and he looked at her, glad to see her a little more clearly. He’d get better. “Ping?” she asked, her voice soft and concerned.

“Yeah.” He shook his head as he wrote, hoping he was underlining _won’t_ and _move_ and _can’t_ and _stop_ before handing it back to her. “Something’s gonna give soon.”

He just had to hope it wasn’t Steve Rogers.

“Electrical brain activity is increasing,” someone said. “Motor cortex is heating up.”

Damn it. Time was running out.

Pepper’s fingers typed behind him. “What does he mean by _sapiens_?” she wondered.

Tony sat down heavily, trying to stay awake. Watching Rogers just lie there only made thinking harder so he closed his gritty, burning eyes again. “No idea. I’m not even sure if that’s what he’s saying, but that’s what it sounds like.” God, he was tired. But he wasn’t any more exhausted than Rogers was, right?

“We’ll figure this out,” he told him, trying hard to sound confident. “I haven’t met a AI that could beat me yet.” He grinned bitterly, too tired to even react to the spike of panic his next words brought. “Or an alien, for that matter.”

“Something’s changing,” Halburt called. “We have higher level brain function.”

Shit. It couldn’t be Rogers, could it? Tony popped to his feet again and wrapped both hands around the bedrail to keep himself upright. Jarvis was going to have to talk him through what was in that data. They didn’t have time to wait for his eyes and they didn’t have time to worry about one more layer of firewalling.

“Jarvis, upload the database. _Now!_ "

* * * * * * * * *

“Betting I won’t want to see it when you’re done with it, though, huh?”

Steve fought the urge to smile. Tony Stark would be throwing out one-liners as he went to his grave. An image popped into Steve’s mind with explicit details on just how to hasten that, and he forcefully pushed it away.

He wouldn’t kill Stark. He wouldn’t kill anyone.

 _Lock me up,_ he thought carefully, remembering how Howard had sniped at him to think like an intelligent man instead of a grunt: _“A clear thought produces a clear picture, Steve.”_

 _Contain the threat, Tony._ Now. Before he really did kill someone.

“If he’s going to do that, at least help me over there so I don’t break any more bones.”

How many bones had Stark broken? How many were left?

Steve mentally sucked in a breath at the vicious thought. God, he hated this. He tried to focus on the outside world, tried to reconnect through more than the clear but out-of-context words of a man he now had roughly thirty ways to kill. But the pain of the burns that covered too much of his body just weakened his resolve, giving more power to the hatred and the anger, and he closed himself off again. The world was safer with him locked away. _I don’t want to kill, Tony._

> _"Do you want to kill Nazis?" Erskine had asked him, back when Steve was used to being beaten._
> 
> _"I don't want to kill anyone," he’d replied._

He wished that was still true. He wished he didn't have so much experience for... whatever he was becoming... to draw on.

“I think I’ve built a circuit board just like that before.” While he didn’t understand the context for them, Tony’s words weren’t quite incomprehensible. Steve remembered Howard explaining circuits while they tested his computing machine. Endlessly.

> _“Eventually, you’re going to have to admit that this one doesn’t work, Howard," he told him, sharing a grin with Bucky at Stark's continued enthusiasm in the face of repeated defeat. Steve had been watching Howard build this elaborate room of circuits for weeks, and every test was a failure._
> 
> _“Eventually.” Howard had smiled the showman’s smile his son had inherited. “But not today.”_

The memory was stripped away as Steve felt the next wave rising and wanted to scream against it. God, was this ever going to be finished?

_I can’t do this much longer._

And still he fought the wave that tried to carry him off. He held himself still and felt muscles and sinews creak and threaten to break loose of his control. He knew exactly where Stark was. He could start with him and then kill as many of the rest of them as possible before they took him down. He’d—

No. _No,_ he whimpered to himself, as the wave ebbed away, leaving him weaker and that much more defeated. _No._

“Can you move?”

Steve wouldn’t shake his head. He wouldn’t smile in relief at the return of the voice that was all he had to keep him sane. If he _was_ sane.

 _I won’t move._ But if he did, Tony would be the first one he’d kill.

 _I won’t KILL!_ But he couldn’t stop. His own anger surfaced, suddenly. _Why won’t you stop me!?_

“Where are you?”

In Hell. If they would just lock him away here, they’d be safe from him.

“Dad, Erskine, Barnes, and a room full of first-gen computer…”

No. No, Dr. Erskine wasn’t there. He’d been dead a long time before Howard even started the project. And Bucky had only been there that time because they’d been headed out for a beer when Howard cornered them. A rare week of R&R before they went back to dismantling Hydra, piece by piece...

> _“I’m calling it Project Sapience.” Howard had been his usual, self-absorbed self, looking at the cathode ray screen before him and seeming to ignore both of them as if he hadn’t just grabbed them and bodily forced them into the room._
> 
> _“What, you mean,_ homo sapiens _?” Bucky had asked, gazing with interest at the electrical guts that surrounded them. He’d always been more interested in the computing machines than Steve had. “Looks more like a junkyard than a person to me,” he’d joked._
> 
> _“Someday, Lieutenant Barnes,” Howard had said, gesturing at the tables and tables of circuits and relays and smiling in that confident way he had. “Someday, a computing machine even more powerful than this one will fit in the palm of your hand.”_
> 
> _Bucky had smiled, and Steve had a pang of regret now that his friend never got to see that day come. “I saw your car at the Expo, Mr. Stark. Someday can be a long way off, huh?”_
> 
> _Howard had grinned good-naturedly. “Maybe so, but reading minds is right here, right now.”_
> 
> _“A computing machine that reads minds?” Steve hadn’t believed a word of it._
> 
> _“Give it a try,” Howard had dared him._
> 
> _While Bucky’d looked on, not even trying not to laugh, Howard had fitted Steve with a helmet covered in wires and little metal pads and turned to the console at the front of the room, where he’d flipped a few switches and turned a dial. “All right...” he’d said as the glass screen flickered. A crawling sensation had risen on Steve’s scalp and spread to all his skin—from the current, he supposed, looking back. Like the bugs from the sphere but without the fire. “Think of something.”_
> 
> _Steve had been used to Howard by that point, even if they weren’t quite friends yet—he’d figured Stark was just pulling his leg. So he’d leaned in to the screen and said, “I really just want a beer.”_
> 
> _Howard had chuckled. “No, don’t_ speak, _Captain. Just think. It’ll hear you.”_

Something was cracking. Steve could feel it. Like the repulsors on Howard’s car at that stupid Expo, something was going to come crashing down all too soon. If only Howard was here now...

Tony was. And Tony was listening. Maybe he’d understand just how tired Steve was. How close to giving in. Maybe he could seal the crack. Maybe he could fix it if Steve let him live long enough.

 _Please,_ he begged, as he lost a little more control. _Please. Lock me away. Stop me from—_

The wave crashed down too hard this time. He couldn’t hold against it, he couldn’t stop it. He just had to give in—just give in. Let it take over and kill. Destroy. Hurt and break and—

_NO!_

“Something’s gonna give soon.”

_Me. I’m gonna give soon._

“We’ll figure this out, Captain.”

No they wouldn't. Something important had changed. Steve could feel it. The entity churned in the darkness beyond him, stalking him in a way it hadn’t before. Maybe it had just been wearing him down. Or maybe it had been waiting for the crack to grow wide enough for it to get inside. 

_No more figuring, Tony,_ he thought. _We’re out of time. Just stop me._

He could stop Tony instead. It would take five seconds to snap his neck. A minute to choke him instead—which might be more fun. If he opened a vein, there’d be a chance they could save him, so that was out...

 _Please, Stark,_ he begged, as he tried and failed to keep the thoughts at bay. There was no trough this time. The wave went on forever and he was becoming part of it. He could feel his burnt fingers twitching, his damaged arms begging to be let loose...

_Please. I tried. I tried, but I’m losing._

If they were stupid, idealistic like him, hoping to save him, they’d restrain him. He’d just break out. Kill them one by one.

 _Please._ He had one way out. _Just kill me. Now._

Or I’ll kill you first.

_Stop me before I stop you._

* * * * * * * * *

An alarm rang on the scanner at the same moment as the chime signaled a ping.

“Holy shit,” one of the blurry people in the room barked out. “Motor cortex just lit up like midtown—he should be jumping off that bed by now!”

 _nomoreSTOP_ losingcontrolrestrain _PLEASE_ killmenow _STOP_

Tony reeled from the anger that was somehow conveyed through the ping. The emotion was clearly Rogers and not the AI—even the phrases were more complete. The pings had only ever been just disconnected words before, without emotion. But now there was brain activity, and that might mean Rogers could communicate more directly. He looked around, but the room had no clear images for him to puzzle out.

_Please, kill me now._

Crap. Rogers knew something they didn’t, didn’t he? If he could communicate more directly, maybe the AI could, too.

“How are those restraints coming, Agent Hill?” he asked, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as he could while still injecting enough urgency into the query.

“Electrical and radiant activity all over the place now,” someone called. “It’s spreading out over his whole brain.”

The door opened and Tony looked over to see a solid mass of what he dearly hoped were security-detail-shaped blobs. 

“The restraints just arrived, Mr. Stark,” she replied, a separate black-clad blob in the corner of the room. “What else can we do?”

“The medical staff needs to get out. They’re just more targets.” He looked around for Pepper, his heart suddenly racing. He needed her safe. “Pepper—”

The computer chimed, announcing another ping, and Steve Rogers reared up on the bed, effortlessly snapping the straps that had held his arms and legs, his eyes popping open to focus on Tony as he launched himself at him. The two men hit the ground and Tony almost blacked out from the pain of a heavy weight on already broken ribs.

 _killyou_ could _have_ stoppedmenow _no_ kill

There was no one in Rogers’s eyes, making the angry, vicious, almost articulate ping Tony heard all the more alien. The data in Steve's brain had finally figured out how to write itself a new AI, and Tony was pretty much powerless to stop the alien computer’s new body from killing him.

Blackened, bleeding hands on his throat squeezed slowly, like the AI wanted to enjoy it. _Someone should,_ he thought grimly, as the world started going dark. Even Rogers slid out of focus before the world exploded into a lightning-short barrage of sound and the weight above him slammed to the side, wrenching his chest painfully as the hands were slow to release their hold.

“Tony!” Pepper sounded frantic. Definitely fit the mood, he thought, as the darkness receded. At least he could breathe now. Sort of. Wow, Rogers was _heavy_! “Tony, can you hear me?”

“He’s still breathing,” someone said.

 _Sort of,_ Tony corrected, trying to force his lungs to fill again. They really didn’t want to.

“Sub Two. Now. Full restraints.” Hill was pissed. “Alert Director Fury immediately.”

“Miss Potts, please, let me have a look at him.” A strange voice. Hands that weren’t Pepper’s were messing with his neck. Another ran along the outside of the circle of fire that comprised most of his chest, reminding him of a hot, dark, frightening cave in the desert. Made it even harder to breathe.

“Stop.” Was that him? Hardly sounded like him. Hardly sounded like a word, in fact. He _did_ want them to stop, though. Hurt like Hell.

“Tony, please say something.”

He looked up at Pepper, who was a little more than a blur now. Maybe being choked half to death sped up recovery? “Ow.”

She sagged back, and he imagined the relieved-annoyed smile she was known to give him on occasion.

“Rogers?” he croaked.

“We’ve got him,” Hill muttered evasively. She was less blurry, too, as she hovered over him, but it was the tone of her voice and the echo of that barrage of noise that alerted him.

“What the hell does that mean?” he croaked, demanding an answer.

“He’s alive, Mr. Stark,” she said. That was _all_ she said, though, and he would have pursued it if it was _easier to breathe_. 

_He’s not alive._ His _body_ is alive... God, he couldn’t breathe! As panic and darkness closed in on him and he heard Pepper’s increasingly worried calls, Tony couldn’t help thinking that that burst of anger was the last they were going to be hearing from Steve Rogers…

Whoever was in there, he was pretty sure it wasn’t Captain America anymore.

* * * * * * * * *

_to be continued..._


	7. Chapter 7

Bruce Banner stood in the security and receiving area of the lobby at Triskelion, waiting. He shouldn’t be here. Tony was going to kill him when he found out—when he woke up. But it was Tony’s fault he was here in the first place, he reasoned, smiling nervously at the equally nervous security detail manning the desk. If the guy would just return a phone call…

It actually hadn’t been much of a surprise to him when he got the email about the meteorite—well, the contents were certainly disturbing, but getting the news from Tony wasn’t. Bruce had figured radiation at the crashdown site must have ruled him off the list of possible experts, and if they were going to bring in someone who  _ wasn’t _ him, it was going to have to be Tony. 

Bruce had briefly thought it was a good thing for his friend to get involved. Once Pepper had headed back to California to run Stark Industries, Tony had haunted the lab he’d given Bruce. He was just so much nervous energy and manic babble most of the time. 

He was scared. 

The Other Guy had been there when Tony went through the wormhole (actually, the Other Guy had saved Tony’s life, which Bruce still couldn’t quite get over), so Bruce didn’t really know what happened, except secondhand. But something  _ had _ , and Tony had been dead by all accounts—at least for a few minutes. Whatever he saw, he wasn’t talking about it. He was talking about everything else, but not that.

So the meteorite seemed like a good diversion. Until it lashed out and nearly killed both Tony and Steve Rogers. Bruce’s mouth had run a little dry when he’d read Tony’s personal note at the end of the stream of data:  _ I’m probably not going to be available when you get this, so contact Hill or Fury. Stay in New York. If things go wrong, they’ll already have one rage monster to deal with. _

_ Not available. _ Trust Tony to understate it so completely. When Bruce had contacted Maria Hill, she’d given him the bare bones story and assured him that Tony was recovering and would be in touch. Bruce’d had no idea of the extent of either man’s injuries until Pepper called him a few hours later to tell him that Tony was unconscious (apparently  _ again _ ) and Steve had been taken to one of the security holding cells on Sub Two, heavily sedated and under full restraints. 

Pepper uploaded the bulk of their findings on the sphere and its AI, and Bruce had taken one quick look, packed his datapad and a toothbrush, and gotten Tony’s pilot to fly him here. He didn’t know as much as Tony did about computers or artificial intelligence, but he knew an awful lot. And he knew even more about radiation, which seemed to be the key to what they were dealing with.

He should be worried about that radiation, he supposed. While not dangerously close to his own wavelength of .4 angstroms, it was still near-gamma—more of a problem for Steve than him—and transmitting violent thoughts besides. But then he wasn’t planning on entering Sub Two at all, and the sphere and suit showed no signs of residual radiation, so he should be fine. He’d been held in one of those holding cells for a brief time and he knew the radiation shielding was more than adequate to keep him from being affected if he didn’t do something stupid like walk into Steve’s room and close the door.

“Dr. Banner, what are you doing here?” 

Bruce smiled guiltlessly as he turned to face a very miffed Agent Hill.

“I heard you needed a consultant,” he said quietly. “An expert on high frequency radiation?”

“A  _ remote _ consultant, Dr. Banner,” she gritted out angrily. “This situation is volatile enough without the added complication of—”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. She was under a lot of stress and he was inclined to cut her a little slack. “I don’t want the Other Guy showing up anymore than you do. I won’t take any unnecessary risks, okay? I just want to help.”

Hill deflated a little. “At this point, I suppose we could use all the help we can get,” she admitted. His security clearance was processed quickly, and Hill led him to the elevators so they could make their way to the forty-fifth floor.

“How are they?” he asked. Pepper hadn’t had a lot of information when she called—Tony was being treated and Steve was en route to his holding cell—but Bruce knew from the sound of her voice that it had been bad.

Hill’s lips pressed together for a moment before she answered. “Mr. Stark is recovering about as well as can be expected for a man who broke four bones in his chest and then had someone try to choke the life out of him.” 

That was graphic. And worrying. Still, he hoped she wouldn’t be so flippant if Tony was critically injured. “What about Steve?”

“Recovering. They removed the bullets—”

“Wait,” he stopped her. “Bullets?” Maybe she  _ would _ be that flippant.

“Two in the side and another in the shoulder. It was deemed the fastest way to prevent him from killing Mr. Stark,” she replied, tightly. That didn’t sound like it had been her idea, thankfully. He wanted to keep liking her. “Luckily, his constitution appears unimpaired.” She snorted. “Well, unluckily, I guess.”

“Has the AI broken through at all?” he asked as the elevator opened onto a quiet hallway and she led him to a closed door. “Tried to communicate?”

“You mean beyond trying to kill anyone who comes near it?” she bit back, pushing open the door to reveal a darkened room. “Not really. We’ve been trying to sedate him to keep it from breaking out. That hasn’t been entirely successful, but it’s made no attempt to open a dialogue.”

Bruce peered into the shadows, waiting for his vision to adjust. Pepper had explained about Tony’s eyes, so Bruce assumed the dimness was for his benefit. A projection computer had been set up and the wall-sized screen had about fifteen data windows open. One of them showed a view of Steve’s holding cell, where he lay unmoving on a gurney, a security web wrapping him from shoulders to ankles. Bruce could see hints of burn mesh and bandages through the webbing. The burns were electrical and thermal and healing, he knew from the information Pepper had sent him, but from what Hill said, Bruce wasn’t sure it mattered one way or another.

Why had the sphere burned him so severely in the first place? Why disable its new host? Apparently Farrar hadn’t been burned badly at all—what was it about Steve that made it attack  _ him _ that way? And there had to be a reason for the massive electrical discharge that had gone along with the original radiation dump... 

Bruce shook his head. That was the problem with aliens—there were just too many unknowns in this. They needed more information. Another data window showed the lab where the sphere was, and it looked like they were nearly through the outer hull. He’d have to get down there if it was safe. Take a look, since Tony couldn’t. 

At the thought, he turned away and focused on the hospital bed behind him. Tony lay as unmoving as Steve, his face red and blistered around the eyes and pale and pasty everywhere else. The bruising on his throat probably seemed more serious than it was in the bluish light of his arc reactor, but Bruce was willing to bet the bruising on his chest hurt just as much as it looked like it did. Pepper dozed with her head cradled in her arms on top of the covers at his shoulder. 

“How much radiation did Tony get?” Bruce asked quietly, trying not to wake Pepper if he didn’t have to. Among the many things Tony wouldn’t talk about was the amount of cosmic radiation he might have been exposed to when he went through that wormhole. The Iron Man suit might be water- and airtight, but it wasn’t made for extra-atmospheric travel and the shielding would have been pretty much useless. Bruce had only recently found out about the palladium poisoning Tony had suffered—strangely around the same time his own life had become the constant nightmare that it was… A normal person wasn’t made to take that many hits.

“Richardson says it’s minimal,” Hill replied in the same quiet tone. “They’re treating him for radiation sickness and he seems to be responding well.”

Bruce nodded. “That’s good.” He put his datapad down on the rolling tray beside Tony’s bed, wincing as the sound woke Pepper, who sat up, startled, and gazed half-lidded at Tony for a moment before getting her bearings and looking up at them. She was on her feet and headed toward him before her eyes were fully open.

“Bruce, what are you doing here?” she asked, worried but more than willing to give him a hug she seemed to desperately need. “I’m not sure it’s safe for you to—”

“I’m not sure it’s safe for anybody to be here,” he countered, smiling in understanding. “Don’t worry. I’m not planning on adding to the chaos.” There was enough of it already. 

Pepper nodded, leading the way back to the hospital bed, where she and he settled into the available chairs. Hill stood to the side, looking at the data windows projected on the wall.

“Has he been awake?” Bruce didn’t assume he had. Pepper looked too nervous and scared for that to be the case.

Pepper shook her head. “It’s been five hours. Dr. Richardson says it’s mostly because he was exhausted to begin with, but…” She sighed. “I guess I should be glad he’s sleeping, huh? At least he’ll get a little rest before he drives himself into the ground again trying to fix this.”

Bruce almost smiled at the memory of Tony explaining the difference between the two of them.  _ “You’re a scientist. You break things to figure out how they work. I’m an engineer. I fix them once you do.” _

“If there’s a way to fix this, we’ll figure it out,” he promised, knowing she needed something to hold on to. 

She reached out and took Tony’s hand in hers, rubbing his fingers carefully. “Sometimes there’s  _ not _ a way to fix things, Bruce.”

This time he did smile. That was exactly what he’d told Tony. He gave her the engineer’s answer. “Yeah, but Tony never learned that lesson, right?” he reminded her, even as the knowledge that he couldn’t fix himself bit at him a little more. “So this must be fixable.”

“This is Hill,” Agent Hill was suddenly saying over her headset. “Go.”

Meanwhile, Pepper grinned at him in gratitude and settled in a little more easily. It was a start.

“They’re finally through the hull on the sphere,” Hill informed them, sounding like she was unhappy about the delay. 

Bruce was a little surprised by it himself. “It’s been over a day. What took so long?”

“Apparently finding an adamantium drill took a while. Also, the outer shell is more than five inches deep,” she continued. “And they had to make sure the interior wasn’t harboring any radiation.”

“Was it?” Bruce asked. He really wanted to take a look at it. Even if Tony woke up now, it didn’t seem like he’d be able to do that for a while, given his eyes. Bruce wasn’t an engineer like Tony, but he could at least report back on what he saw. 

“No. The sphere is showing zero radiation now, actually, so—” she glared at him as he rose. “Dr. Banner, you promised me—”

“The thing is cold, Agent Hill—you said so yourself,” he reminded her. “This isn’t an unnecessary risk, it’s a... necessary gathering of information.”

She didn’t like it, but she did silently concede the point. “All right, let’s go then.” She nodded to Pepper, who gave them both a tight smile and went back to waiting.

* * * * * * * * *

Bruce and Hill had been gone for about twenty minutes when the computer beeped and one of the data windows updated to show the results of Steve’s latest scan, which looked pretty much like the scan before it. She couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. At least the radiation load seemed to be lessening—that she  _ would _ take as a good sign.

Halburt and Richardson had talked about what had happened and she understood about half of what they said, but the scans themselves were all anyone needed, really. There was almost no area in Steve’s brain that hadn’t been taken over in the electrical storm that precipitated his attack on Tony. Some areas of what Halburt had called the striate cortex were nearly dormant, a space for the excess radiation to pool, but the rest of his brain…

It didn’t look like a circuit board now, just a wash of reds and oranges all over. The electrical impulses were regular neurons firing, according to Halburt, but it was like all of them were firing,  _ all _ the time. It seemed it was only going to be a matter of time before the AI used him up. All his energy was going to keeping the computer in his brain functioning.

When it was conscious—if you could call it conscious—Steve’s body fought endlessly to get free. Its eyes were wide and calculating and it was absolutely silent, but no less determined for the lack of sound. All it did was make a creepy situation creepier because it was nothing like the man any of them knew and it had been almost instinctual for them all to start calling it “it”. 

And yet, they still hoped Steve was in there somewhere, just overwhelmed by the AI’s power play. To try to give him—and themselves—time, the doctors were working on synthesizing a stronger sedative that wouldn’t kill him. A small, dismal part of Pepper’s mind wondered whether he’d really thank them for that.

She wished Tony was awake. He’d have some idea of what was going on—alien or not, the artificial intelligence couldn’t be too much different from the ones that Tony had been obsessed with since his childhood.

He’d once told her about a computer his father had that could read your mind and tell you which card you’d pick of the four it showed you. It was all a parlor trick, of course, and the third time nine-year-old Tony had played it, he’d figured out how it was done, but what had intrigued him, he said, was the utter conviction the computer’s personality showed. It was like a flim-flam man in transistors.

He’d both loved and distrusted AIs from then on.

She looked over at the bed and watched him for a while, convincing herself that he’d be all right. He looked drawn and exhausted even unconscious, but at least he was breathing more easily now.

She glanced at the data window that showed the sphere lab. Bruce was hovering over the thing now, along with the other scientists. It looked like there was an inner shell that they were working on breaching. Pepper grinned to herself, glad to have a bright spot in all of this. Bruce was a good man. If anyone could help, it would be him.

“Pepper? Is Tony awake yet?” 

Bruce’s voice was tight and shocked as it burst from the speakers. He turned up toward the camera to look at her from the subbasement far below.

“Not yet,” she replied, wondering what they’d found.

“I’m awake,” Tony mumbled behind her. “Sort of.”

She fetched up against the bed, watching him blink.

“I’m on my way up,” Bruce said. Pepper hoped Tony was completely awake before he got there.

“What’s Bruce doing here?” Tony ground out. His voice was hoarse and the sound of him clearing his throat made her wince in sympathy. “He wasn’t supposed to come here.”

She noticed that, other than the initial blinking as he woke, he’d kept his eyes shut. She’d discussed this with Dr. Richardson already. It had been more than 40 hours since he’d suffered the burns, and 6 since the last time they’d administered the paralytic eye drops. He should be seeing something clearly by now. If not, then the burns were more extensive than they knew and his vision would probably be permanently impaired. She knew Tony knew all that, too.

“You scared him to death with that email,” she told him sharply. “What were you thinking sending him that?” As expected, without thinking, he opened his eyes to defend himself and she held her breath when he froze and swallowed hard. The tiny smile he gave was good, but the actual focus on her face was even better.

“Hi,” he rasped quietly.

“Hi,” she whispered back. 

He just looked at her for a minute and she let herself enjoy it. One minute where they weren’t saving the world today in some way or another. It was nice.

“Jarvis, where’s my database,” he snapped abruptly, looking around and trying to focus farther into the room. “Don’t tell me you were sleeping, too.”

“I am here, sir,” Jarvis said. “As always.”

_ And, _ the moment was over.

Pepper shook her head ruefully. At least they could still  _ have _ a moment, right? 

"The database was corrupted when the Ophelia program was run," Jarvis went on. It almost sounded angry at Tony—like he'd killed one of its offspring... "I am attempting to resurrect the data structure."

She pressed the call button and slowly tilted the head of the bed up so he could sit without using any of the muscles that had been so abused lately. He’d fight having Richardson take another look at him, but he was in a hospital now—a rarity—and she was going to make sure that, for once, he was properly taken care of.

She watched him try to look at the screen across the room. His eyes were obviously nowhere near completely recovered, but Richardson had said not to expect them to be yet. 

"Let me take a look at what you have already," Tony murmured. I need a screen over here..."

Abruptly, his head dropped hard to the back of the bed and he closed his eyes.

“Damn it,” he whispered. “Is he dead?” The question was full of emotions Pepper wished weren’t there: fear, loss, anger. Guilt.

“No,” she replied quickly, looking behind her to try to see what he’d seen to make him ask that. A square about the size of her hand, off in the corner of the computer wall was counting down from 67, its face red to signal the time between Steve’s pings and Tony’s. As she watched, it switched back to green. He couldn’t have seen the numbers, but he’d had Jarvis set that timer up himself and knew what the colors meant.

“No ping,” he said, his voice dark enough to make her turn back to him and take his hand.

“He’s still alive, Tony,” she promised. “They have him as heavily sedated as they dare.” Not as sedated as he needed to be, unfortunately. “It’s probably why he’s not transmitting.”

He nodded, trying to recover from the scare. He must have gotten used to the bursts of conversation—if it could be called that—that proved Steve Rogers was still in there somewhere. She wished he didn’t have that unwelcome silence in his head. That might give them all hope that there was someone to save down there.

“It’s funny,” he said quietly, staring at their hands for lack of anything else close enough to focus on. “Dad searched for Rogers for more than three years after the crash. He’d be pissed if I let him die this easy.” He snorted, looking up at her and actually focusing. “Sometimes, when I was a kid and someone would get him talking about the good old days... felt like Dad cared more about a guy who’d frozen to death forty years ago than me.”

Pepper didn’t say anything to that. There was nothing  _ to _ say. Tony’s problems with his dad weren’t something that could ever be fixed, though whatever happened to help Tony build the new arc reactor had obviously given him some measure of peace. It did explain a lot about his attitude toward Steve sometimes, though.

“Okay, then,” he said finally, settling himself with a little self-deprecating smile. “Let’s see if we can figure out how to get that thing out of him.”

“Tony, you need to see this.”

Bruce walked in without preamble, a plastic dish in his hand. His face was tight with irritation, and his eyes flicked up to the screen for a long second to watch Steve’s body start struggling again, its glare violent and cunning. He blinked away a darkness Pepper knew he couldn’t dwell on, and turned his back on the sight.

For his part, Tony nodded his hello as Bruce handed him the dish, but there was a twist to his mouth that said he and Banner would have words later about the risk Bruce had taken in coming here. Using the tweezers Bruce brought with him to pick up an old-time caterpillar transistor array, Tony snorted in anger as he tried to focus. Bruce gave him a magnifying glass before he could speak a word.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered viciously, looking from the array to Bruce. “This didn’t come out of the sphere?”

Pepper looked at each of them in turn. A transistor in the sphere? How…?

Bruce nodded. “I know. Hard to believe. They just finished cutting through the secondary hull. Good old American steel.”

“It’s  _ human _ ?” she blurted out. “Or, I mean—”

“It’s one of ours,” Tony grated, handing the dish to her. Pepper was struck by the anger in his face. 

“Did S.H.I.E.L.D. build this?” she asked. How could that be? There was  _ nothing _ human about whatever was going on here. Nevertheless she picked up the array gingerly, and froze as she read the words printed there, above a familiar, if out-dated, logo:

**STARK ENT**

“No,” Tony said. “One of  _ ours _ ours.”

* * * * * * * * *

_ to be continued... _


	8. Chapter 8

“How was this level of technology even possible back then?”

Nick Fury was pissed. Not as pissed as Tony himself, but impressively pissed. Whatever the hell this thing was, the materials inside dated to the mid-1960s and all of them were Stark tech. Nothing anyone had at that point should have been able to do what this had done. They were trying to interface with it in the regular way now, but it looked like it must either have been made to port and trash or had been hopelessly garbled by Tony’s attempt to stop the transfer altogether.

Rogers’s transfer had been interrupted in the process as well, but there’d obviously been enough of a… backup? Remnant? Something, anyway, to keep his individual brain waves intact until the data wrote a new OS. Maybe it had just tried to write him over with zeroes and he’d bled through. At least for a while.

Tony looked at the monitor he’d had them set up next to his bed so he could see it. His eyes were getting better by the minute, but he still couldn’t see clearly much past the end of the bed. The brain scan showed that whatever blank drive space Rogers might have had was gone, or nearly so.

He wondered grimly just how many petabytes a human soul took up and whether the blank spaces in Steve’s brain were enough to hold it. The radiation was slowly leaching away, but there was no guarantee it hadn’t destroyed whatever he might have had left. Tony took a deep breath and steered his mind away from the thought.

On the video feed, Rogers’s body was in the middle of one of its episodes, writhing and pushing and fighting to get past the restraints. It was becoming more and more calculating about it. Like the AI was learning how to use his body better. Tony watched a countdown hit zero in the corner of his display and held his breath for eight seconds.

Nothing.

Whatever his father’s people had built had done a hell of a job, he thought bitterly. Steve Rogers was gone. Not even the AI was reaching out to Tony now—and of course,  _ he _ was feeling much better as a result. How had they generated that much radiation—why? Who the hell would possibly have thought to create something like this anyway?

“I don’t know,” he finally replied to Fury, looking up at the man who wanted a target—any target.

_ ”I’ll find you a target, Captain.” _ Too damn late for that.

“I don’t know. I mean, Hydra came up with a lot of advanced technology, and Dad tapped into that with Paper Clip, but…"

“Sapience.”

Fury turned on Agent Hill at her quiet exclamation. “What?”

She startled and cleared her throat. “Rogers told us himself. Not ‘sapiens’. Project Sapience. It started as an idea for a mind reading or lie detecting machine, I think, but the focus changed after the war. It was aborted in the early fifties because Stark couldn’t figure out a way to port information back into the human brain.”

Tony would never cease to be amazed at the depths of his father’s depths. “He wanted to use the human mind as a storage device?” Awesome. Someone started typing on the keyboard of a laptop. Tony had to hope they were hacking S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files. 

“A repository, I think,” Hill said, obviously trying hard to remember. “He had the idea that the brain could be programmed to store megabytes of information and access it at will in small databursts. Trials proved that the normal human brain just wasn’t capable of handling the strain.”

Which made sense. Even Rogers couldn’t handle it, though he’d tried to fight it for as long as he could. Didn’t explain why it was trying to turn him into a killing machine, though. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was radiation storing the data and not electrical impulses? It was damaging the tissue as it went, warping its own data?

“What’s in the repository?” Fury asked, living up to his name. “Have you gotten into the suit yet?”

Tony guessed  _ he _ was the target, for now. He really didn’t give a damn so long as they figured this out. “Jarvis is keeping it isolated to prevent contagion. He has it on a secured feed, but there’s a lot of degradation.”

“Show us the damn thing anyway!” Fury growled. “It’s gotta give us some idea of what we’re up against.”

“Jarvis, you heard the man,” Tony said quietly, convinced that Fury knew he was standing just far enough away for Tony not to be able to glare at him properly. “Show us the damn thing.”

“Reinforcing secure uplink now,” Jarvis said.

“How do you know so much about Sapience, by the way?” Tony murmured to Hill while they waited. She was standing close enough that he could see the tight set of her shoulders.

She kept her eyes on the large screen across the room. “I like to know who I’m working for. He  _ was _ one of the founding members of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Tony grinned, trying to cut the tension in the room, and especially in her. She’d been here the whole time, it felt like, and it looked like Fury had been riding her. “Another Stark groupie,” he said quietly. “I get it.”

She cracked a smirk and the tension seeped out of her just a smidge. “Only the interesting ones,” she replied.

“Uplink is secure and awaiting activation, sir,” Jarvis put in, interrupting the rejoinder that… well, Tony would have thought of one.

“Activate away,” he said instead.

Jarvis carded through the data slowly. Though the majority of it was corrupt static, some of it could be deciphered. Images of the Greek Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, Vietnam, Ecuador, Zaire, Iran-Iraq, Palestine, the Congo… Not just images, but data: troop movements and torture techniques and extraction procedures…

“How much of the database are we actually getting, J?” Tony asked grimly, watching the fragments and photos and data flip by.

“Approximately 65% of the data is irretrievable, sir,” Jarvis answered. “I have done what I could to stabilize the rest.”

“It was made to catalog war,” Pepper whispered, horrified. She looked at Fury, as if he’d had a hand in this. Which, okay, maybe he had at some point. “They wanted to put  _ that _ in someone’s brain? Where was it?”

Tony saw the flaw. “They were never going to put it in anyone’s brain. Not the way it is. And half of that data was from after it was constructed.” He shook his head, watching Fury carefully. “It must have been added to. Kept somewhere safe. A repository for the repository?”

Fury was a better bluffer than most, but not good enough, even as blurry as he was right now. He at least had an idea, now they knew what was in it. “Where was it, Nick?” Tony asked, his very tone demanding an answer. “On one of your spy satellites?”

Hill looked at her boss and looked away.

And then looked back. She had balls. “Sir?”

Fury’s jaw clenched. “There’s a possibility. The Providentia satellite was launched in 1965 as an offsite storage facility for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s extensive monitoring of global threats. There were never any photographs of the storage devices themselves for security reasons, but they  _ were _ designed to look alien to deter civilian investigation if the satellite ever crashed.”

Tony made a face. “Looks pretty alien,” he conceded. “A simple hard drive wouldn’t be capable of this, though.” God, this was all starting to make a sort of horrible sense. “Something on the satellite was collecting data, too, wasn’t it?”

Fury sighed, frustrated by the truth, as usual. “The satellite contained a rudimentary artificial intelligence, capable of gathering data independent of the bursts S.H.I.E.L.D. sent up at regular intervals. The project was scrapped in 1995. They just left the satellite up there.”

“And it kept gathering,” Tony said, watching images of the twenty-first century conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir and Sudan flash across his screen. If it was his dad’s group, he'd bet the AI was more than rudimentary. They’d created some amazing precursors to the work that Tony had built his career on. There’d been a rumor they’d even tried transferring a human consciousness into a computer. Maybe it was more than a rumor, if this was what they could do...

“So the AI went dark side,” he heard himself say, watching Hill twitch right along with him at the reminder of Rogers. “Used the data it had to create whatever landed in that field. How?”

“Nothing we had back then could generate the radiation it was letting off,” Bruce said quietly from his spot in the corner. Tony noticed pretty early on that Banner seemed to feel safer—or feel like everyone else was safer—when he had a wall at his back. Wasn’t a coincidence that the lab space he’d given him didn’t have any windows. 

The radiation again... Tony's mind conjured up the idea he'd had in that field, staring at the glowing blue of the thing. "The Tesseract could do it."

Hill nodded. "Or even the Chitauri weapons themselves. We lost a lot of space-based equipment during the conflict."

“A conflict, huh?" Tony muttered. "Was that what it was?"

“If it was hit, the vibranium alloy might have transferred the power to the interior systems.”

“Great.” Tony had a horrible thought. “Fury, you said storage  _ devices _ ? Are we going to have more of these things falling from the sky?”

Hill pursed her lips and put her hand to her ear to activate her headset. “I need the Near Earth Watch System activated. Center on the orbit of the Providentia satellite and find it.” She looked at Fury after the fact, but he didn’t seem inclined to take her to task for her initiative.

“We’ll need the processing unit intact, if it’s there,” he said, but Hill was already nodding.

“Well this is all great, but what does it have to do with Project Sapience?” Bruce asked. “Or what happened to Steve?”

Everyone looked to Hill, who impressively didn’t flinch. “I don’t know. It’s possible that Sapience was housed on the satellite. I just remember reading about the project in passing while I was—”

“Crushing on my dad,” Tony finished for her. Hill smiled and relaxed further, and Pepper reached out and swatted him on the head. “Ow!” Was that necessary? “Still have a concussion, thank you.” He grinned his appreciation, though. Hill deserved the break.

“There’s no data on Project Sapience that I can find in the S.H.I.E.L.D. databases,” Bruce announced, confirming Tony’s guess about the keyboard work he’d been doing while they talked. “I have the specs for Providentia, though.” A set of schematics appeared on both screens and Tony started looking through them, seeing a still-blurry Bruce walk across the room to take a look at it on the big screen.

“I don’t recall giving you access to that database, Dr. Banner,” Fury muttered, not so much angry as annoyed.

“Sorry,” Bruce replied, clearly not. He went back to examining the satellite blueprints.

“I might have given him the magic key,” Tony told Fury, raising his hand and drawing fire without looking away from the information before him. There had to be a way to open the dataspheres. There were no notes, though. He had an idea where they could look for those...

“We had those encryption keys changed,” Hill replied. Was that just a shade of geeky awe in her voice?

Tony shrugged, glancing up at her. “ _ Magic _ key.”

“None of this gets Steve back, guys,” Pepper pointed out quietly.

Tony clenched his jaw, his hand freezing in its move to page through the data before him. He couldn’t say it.

“I don’t think that’s possible.” Apparently Bruce could, though, if reluctantly. “Given the space the database is currently taking up and the radiation...” Tony flinched.  _ Yes. Let’s not forget the radiation. _

“We don’t know that,” Pepper persisted, real pain in her voice. Jealousy reared its head again and Tony welcomed the twelve millisecond break. “There might be something to this Sapience Project that we can use if we can find out more about it.”

“If the files aren’t in the database,” Nick said firmly, “then they must have been destroyed. S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have the room back then to store the results of every failed experiment.”

“Dad did,” Tony said decisively. He exchanged a significant look with Fury. “You knew him—did you really think you were the only person who had a box full of his notes in your basement?”

He looked up at Pepper. “If you want the project files, the place to start is the mansion.”

And getting her all the way to Westchester county was a good way to get himself some unwanted time alone with Dr. Richardson.

* * * * * * * * *

“It’s disturbing for someone to be this rich.”

Maria looked around at the palatial grounds and the impressive building before them. A substantial yet understated sign at the edge of the half mile long driveway had read “Stark Museum: by appointment only.”

“Really disturbing.”

Pepper smiled as she parked by the front door. “It takes some getting used to,” she admitted.

Maria shook her head, but Dr. Banner answered for her as he exited the car. “Not sure I could ever get used to this.” Which was saying something from a guy who had half a floor of Stark Tower at his disposal.

Pepper led the way up the outer stairs, and the front door opened before they reached it, held by a small woman with chocolate brown skin and long bone white hair twisted into elaborate braids. “Hi, Cecilia,” Pepper called. “How are things?”

“Museum work is boring, as usual, Pepper,” the woman replied, hugging Pepper and ushering them all in. “Cecilia Marcus,” she introduced herself, shaking Maria and Dr. Banner’s hands in greeting. “I’m the curator here.” She turned back to Pepper, all business. “Tony said you wanted to go down to the Pit?”

“The Pit?” Maria asked, watching Pepper shudder in mock apprehension. 

Both women grinned at her, but Cecilia answered, leading them to a door off the enormous foyer with a sign reading “Staff only: No entry” She unlocked it, unlocked another door behind it, and led them down the stairs it revealed. “Howard never threw anything away. Damn packrat kept every note he ever wrote. Maria made him confine his tendencies to the downstairs laboratory.”

At the bottom of the stairs, she input a code in a keypad, stood on tiptoe for a retinal scan, and unlocked yet another door—a heavy steel one that looked built to withstand a nuclear blast. Maria supposed it might have been. Cecilia threw open the door and ushered them all in. “She called it The Pit.” She smiled at the looks on their faces. “The name just kind of stuck.”

It was definitely a pit. A well-organized pit, but…

“This is going to take a while,” Dr. Banner said, looking around in interest at the shelves full of boxes that lined the walls and ran from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling. There were also tables, full of… everything.

“Well don’t rush yourselves,” Cecilia told him with a chuckle. “I don’t have another tour scheduled until tomorrow.” She nodded at Pepper. “I’ll have Terrence bring down something to munch on.”

“Thanks, Cecilia,” Pepper said warmly, turning serious as the older woman left. “Okay. Tony said start at the back and work forward. Howard was apparently better at labeling than his son is.”

And still it took hours. Maria tried to keep focused on why they were here, but Howard Stark had always been a sort of secret obsession of hers. To be looking through  _ his _ files and standing in  _ his _ lab….

Her hero worship stopped abruptly as she lit upon a box marked “Sapience—Trials.”

“I’ve got it,” she called, opening the box and flipping quickly through the files. There was a box behind it labeled “Sapience—General.”

She pulled both down and carried them to a nearby table, setting them carefully on one corner. The General box drew her attention first and she paged through, looking for something to jump out at her.  _ Stimulated neural reordering _ was the name of one large folder. Sounded ominous...

“I found a box marked ‘Providence,’” Dr. Banner announced from the next row over. “It looks like satellite schematics. Could be they changed the name?”

The door to the upper mansion clanged open.

“Pepper!?”

Maria turned at the alarm in Cecilia’s voice. Pepper was already running for the front of the room, heels clicking loudly on the concrete. Maria and Banner followed suit.

“Tony called—no reception down here.” Cecilia looked serious. “Says something happened with your friend Steve. You need to get back to Washington. The helicopter will be here in fifteen minutes.”

Maria closed her eyes briefly. Damn it.

“I’ll grab the boxes,” Dr. Banner said, putting action to words and heading back to the rows of files.

As Maria and Banner loaded the boxes on a hand truck, Pepper went upstairs and called Tony.

“Steve got out,” Pepper said tightly once she’d hung up. They stood out on the back veranda as the sky darkened into night, waiting for the Stark Industries helicopter that would shave a couple of hours off of their return trip. “He didn’t kill anybody, but it’s bad.”

Damn. Funny how Maria had been dreading  _ this _ more than Captain Rogers dying. If they ever got him back, he’d have a hard time living with himself. Unlike Clint Barton, Rogers didn’t have a home in the country and wife who took no shit to retreat to while he worked through it.

“Where is he now?” Dr. Banner wanted to know.

“Full restraints in one of the interrogation rooms.”

Maria shook her head. They should have put him in one of those in the first place. Lined with vibranium, they were almost escape-proof. Everyone had just wanted so hard to believe that he was in there somewhere. That this was temporary.

“We’ll get him back,” Banner said quietly, looking up at the sound of rotors, his eyes following the helicopter down to its landing on the expansive lawn.

Maria just wished he sounded more confident.

* * * * * * * * *

Tony’s voice could be heard clearly from down the hall as they stepped off the elevator and made their way to his room. “And I’m telling you I’m going down there. If you don’t want me to walk then either get me a wheelchair or… I don’t know—find someone to carry me.”

Pepper would have laughed if she could have found humor in anything today. Bruce pushed the hand truck loaded with boxes into the room as Maria held the door.

Tony was sitting on the edge of his bed, clearly unsteady but staring Dr. Richardson down.

“Pepper! Thank God.” Tony slid down the edge of the bed to his feet and appeared to stay there by sheer force of will. It was obvious he could see her from across the room now, but he looked exhausted. “Dr. Richardson says I’m not fit to go downstairs, so get me a chair or something, will you?”

She’d vainly hoped he’d rest at least a little while she was gone, instead of working himself into collapse. She should have known better.

Richardson was clearly angry. “As I told Mr. Stark, the new damage to his lung, coupled with the existing broken bones and—”

A glare and a quick response cut off whatever he was going to say. “—could cause more extensive damage with exertion, blah blah blah.” Tony barely waved his hand weakly in dismissal. Pepper would lay odds he couldn’t take a step on his own if he tried.

Still, she sighed at the inevitable and turned to one of the orderlies. “Could you please get Mr. Stark a wheelchair? Please?” She ushered the poor man out before Richardson could order him not to do it. “Thank you. Thanks very much.”

“Miss Potts—”

“I’ll take full responsibility, Doctor,” she assured him.

“Miss Potts,” Richardson repeated, addressing her, but keeping his eyes on Tony. “I don’t think I’m being overly dramatic when I say that Mr. Stark’s life is dependent on him staying here and  _ healing _ .”

Tony cocked his head. “You are being a  _ little _ overly dramatic,” he replied blithely, but his eyes hardened. “On the other hand, Captain Rogers’s life really does depend on me being  _ there _ , not  _ here _ , so—” The door opened behind Pepper, and Tony clapped his hands, his lips tightening in pain at the movement. “Fantastic. Wheelchair.”

Pepper knew he had to do this, but she didn’t have to make it easy. And God knew Richardson wasn’t going to. Richardson signaled to the orderly to stop just inside the door and crossed his arms, daring Tony to get there on his own.

“Um, little help here, Pep?” Tony asked after a moment, as the wheelchair stayed obviously out of his reach.

“Oh, you’ve got this, don’t you, Tony?” she replied. She really did understand his need to be down there—she wanted to be down there herself—but he also needed a lesson in his own mortality every once in a while. If an extra minute of teaching him a lesson up here meant they might keep him in the wheelchair while he was down there, so much the better.

“Fine,” he said, that little-boy whine in his voice. He moved one foot forward and carefully shifted his weight, glaring at Richardson until the unrepentant doctor moved out of his way. Pepper clearly would have lost her bet, as he took another shuffling step. Another. Another. He was starting to shake now.

“Great, yes, I see your point,” he finally gritted out, panting hard. “I’ll stay in the chair. Just…” He gave her a pleading and exasperated look. “Please? Okay?”

Pepper nodded to the orderly and took control of the chair, sliding it smoothly up to Tony. Bruce came forward to help settle him into it.

“Thank you.” Tony didn’t actually sound all that grateful, but she was used to that by now. “Let’s go.”

“I think I’ll stay here,” Bruce said quietly. “Read through the files we brought back.” Pepper noticed the look that passed between him and Tony. There was no reason to think he'd be affected—but there was no need to take chances, either.

Her gaze drifted to the new video feed on the wall screen. Steve was laid out on a gurney, motionless, his face completely slack. And still they’d bound him to the thing like a mummy, the only opening being a space for the IV that seemed to be keeping him more heavily sedated this time. There was no consideration for his injuries here—only protection against him.

“I’ll stay, too,” Maria added. “Maybe we can find something to help us understand how this happened.” She looked at the clock in the upper left corner of the wall screen. “We should have a team at the satellite any time now. Our crew can work on accessing it up there and then interface with Jarvis.”

Tony nodded from his place in the chair, too much pain and too much exhaustion on his face. “Good plan. Okay.” He raised both hands barely above where they lay in his lap and pointed toward the door. “Onward, yeah?”

Pepper sighed and pushed him out the door.

* * * * * * * * *

Tony wasn’t going to pass out. He wasn’t. There was no time to do it and nothing good would come of it, so he just wasn’t going to.

Really. Even if he was more exhausted than he could remember being in a very long time.

“We can have them set up a bed in the observation room,” Pepper whispered to him, worried amusement in her voice that had him looking up at her crystal clear face to see the smile that matched. God, it was good to see again.

“I’ll be good,” he promised, immediately qualifying his response. “Well, as good as I ever am, anyway.”

“Tell me what happened,” she asked quietly. “What  _ really _ happened.”

Tony sighed, remembering the feeling of sitting on his bed completely unable to stop what unfolded on the screen before him.

“They went in to replenish the sedatives—had an idea for one he might not be able to wake up from as easily. Three guards and a fully armed med tech.” He shook his head. “He snapped the webbing and took down the tech and two of the guards before the third managed to shoot him with a few tranquilizer darts.” Tony had been surprised to feel his heart nearly stop when that had happened. Steve had dropped like a stone. “A curare derivative—paralyzed him quickly, thank God.” He shook his head. “A tetrodotoxin would have slowed down his mental processes, too, but they don’t want to risk it, yet.”  _ Because nobody wants to be the one who kills Captain America. _

Pepper put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

“They’ll all live,” he said, pretending he could still try to look on the bright side. “Agent Wershil won’t be eating solid food for a while, but…”

“Tony—”

“You know it’s probably not worth it at this point?” he whispered, interrupting her before she got a chance to say something comforting. He’d been trying to convince himself it wasn’t true for basically the entire time he’d been awake since Steve attacked him, but he was just too tired to fight it anymore. “Now it’s just figuring out how to stop him.”

Given his whole superhuman status, it was actually harder than it should be, unless they wanted to just put a gun to his heart and pull the trigger. Problem was, even Fury wasn’t willing to do that yet. “If there’s one chance in a million, we owe it to the man to try,” Fury had said.

Tony wasn’t sure there  _ was _ one chance. Which made him wonder why he was risking coming down here at all. If Richardson was right, he should have been keeping his distance. But that would mean giving up on that one chance, wouldn’t it?

The elevator dinged and Pepper rolled him out into the brightly lit anteroom of Sub Two. A set of thick steel doors separated them from the row of interrogation cells. The guards didn’t say a word. One of them came forward and led him and Pepper down the hall toward the main observation room.

“I want to go in,” Tony heard himself say. The cells were shielded, after all. There was no way to test this if he was in the observation room. He’d only be able to see for himself that Rogers was gone if he could wheel into that room and see… just that room.

“Tony, he—”

“Just…” He wasn’t even really sure why he needed to do this, but he did. There was almost no chance that this was anything more than just saying goodbye. To a guy he kind of only liked a little? A guy who wouldn’t even know he was there anyway? A guy who was a clear danger to him… “I want to go in.”

“He’s fully restrained, ma’am,” the guard piped up, whispering. Tony was sure he wasn’t supposed to be offering this. “I wouldn’t risk staying long, but the docs say the drugs are working for now.”

Tony almost laughed at that. They were still worried about Steve coming out of it, when the amount of poison they’d already given him should have him out for days—should have killed him outright, in fact.

_ Kill me now. _ Tony shook his head to dispel the memory of the feeling of those words in his mind.

“Okay, Tony,” Pepper told him, understanding in her voice. Maybe she needed to say goodbye, too. “Then you need to be somewhere quiet.”

“He’s paralyzed and comatose,” Tony joked blackly. “How much quieter does it get?”

Each of the interrogation cells had its own vault-like doors, like they were guarding the crown jewels. Hell, once upon a time, Captain America sort of was the crown jewel for the US military, wasn’t he? Three more heavily armed agents had joined them now and the first guard spun the wheel of the door and preceded them into the room.

Rogers was still motionless. Dead looking, really.

Something flashed in Tony’s vision and was gone again.

“Pepper…”

Again. Something quick and familiar. The room of vacuum tubes, maybe, but fragmented, barely visible.

“Shit.” Tony gritted his teeth and grabbed the wheels of his chair, trying not to scream from the pain as he rolled forward. Damn it, he  _ was _ here!

“Steve?”

“What!?” Pepper exclaimed, voice quiet despite her shock. He could feel her come up behind him as he tried desperately to see what he knew was there. There were only flickerings, though. That couldn’t be all that was left. Why couldn’t he see it? Why…?

“Because I can see everything else,” he murmured. That had to be it. Well he wasn’t burning his eyeballs out again, that was for sure, but maybe… “I need Richardson. And some of those eye drops.”

Something red and gold and silver flashed for a second beyond Rogers’s bed.

“He’s still in there,” he said, looking up at her and finding her incredulous but hopeful. “I don’t know where he’s finding the space to hide, but he’s in there.”

“Tony, are you sure?” Pepper wasn’t. But he could see she was willing to take the chance.

One chance in a million, huh?

“Wait for the ping…” Tony murmured, wishing he’d brought his datapad down. A long minute passed. Another…  _ Come on, Steve. _

“Sir?” The guard who’d let them in was obviously rethinking his decision. “We can’t let you stay here.”

“Come on,” Pepper said, grabbing the handles of his wheelchair. “We’ll wait for Richardson in the observation room.”

“We’ll be back, Cap,” he called, unsure if Rogers could hear him at all, but unwilling to let him believe he was alone. “As soon as we can. We’ll be back.”

* * * * * * * * *

Steve Rogers didn’t miss the irony that the one thing he’d been refusing to do since the beginning of all this—move  _ anything _ —was the thing he most wanted to do now. But the relentless pressure was gone from his mind, and for hours, days, forever, he’d been trying to move, to hear, to do anything but  _ see _ .

Maybe the sphere had finally just driven him insane and here, this, was all that was left: a bizarre, silent, endless parade of newsreels detailing his life. He saw people’s mouths move and he remembered that he used to be able to read lips, but it was like words were missing. Language was gone. All that was left were the pictures….

_ Twenty years old and ignored. Bucky and the girls, and him. Always. But Bucky wanted him there and he wanted to be with Bucky. So he went. _ They _ danced.  _ They _ flirted. He and Bucky talked. And the girls ignored him. _

_ Three years old and sick in bed. His mother rubbing something on his chest. His father reading a book to him, shaking with coughs of his own. _

_ Ninety-four years old and adrift. File after file of people who thought they’d survived him only to find he’d outlived them instead: Morita, Dernier, Jones... Peggy—alive, but ninety-two and frail. Too frail. _

_ Twenty-five years old and fit. In battle and ready for it, finally. Bucky and Dum Dum and Falsworth… Hydra hadn’t known what hit them. _

It was endless. As relentless in its own way as the pressure and anger and horror had been before. He was trapped now. Forever? Was this Hell? Or was this the moment before the end of your life, when the whole thing flashed before you?

_ Twenty-seven and freezing. Broken bones and blood and twisted metal. A face screwed up in pain he can’t feel now. Tears. Something silent said, despairing. _

His life hadn’t flashed then, when he should have died. Back then it was all just ice and cold and waiting to freeze solid.

Now he was frozen again, but there was no oblivion to embrace him.

_ Tony Stark. Cocky, annoying. But worried. And sick. _

Steve stopped. He tried to freeze the image in his mind, because he didn’t remember it.

It wasn’t his life.

_ Tony Stark, lying on a torn and wasted street, suit battered and cracked. Lifeless. _

_ That _ was his life.  _ That _ happened.

_ Tony Stark. Cocky, annoying, worried, sick... _

So what was this?

* * * * * * * * *

_ to be continued... _


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry guys—I forgot a part I always meant to put in, so now it'll be 12 parts instead of 10! So, not really totally finished, then. :s

Stark's hospital room had no patient. Instead, it had become a study hall of sorts, as Maria and Dr. Banner went through the information they'd collected in upstate New York.

“I don’t understand," Maria said, looking at the video link of Pepper from the observation room on Sub Two. "Are you saying he thinks Rogers is communicating in—what?—pictures?” Maria looked past Pepper’s image to the scene behind her, where Richardson was dripping something reluctantly into Tony Stark’s eyes. Stark looked exhausted and Richardson looked worried, and Maria had an uneasy feeling that there was something here that the rest of them were missing.

“It makes a weird sort of sense, actually,” Dr. Banner put in from his place next to her. “According to the scans,” he continued, bringing the file of fMRI images up on the wall screen and paging through them until he found what he was looking for, “there were only two small areas of his brain that were unaffected by the electrical storm when the database took over.” He circled an area on the scan: two dark spots surrounded by the dense white of activity. “The striate cortex. It’s part of the visual system of the brain.” He stood back, thoughtful. “Maybe that’s all he can do.”

“And Stark thinks he can only see glimpses now because his eyes have recovered from the burns that were letting him see the images before?” Maria was trying to understand all of this, but it was starting to go over her head. Computers were her thing—computers and fighting. The human brain was not.

“I’m actually sitting right here,” Stark piped up, blinking furiously. Pepper stepped out of the way of the camera to give him the floor. “The brain processes sight differently when you see differently—even if you’re just watching a movie with 3-D glasses, or… Look, people with strabismus or wall-eye or _crossed_ eyes, even color blindness—their brains don’t process sight the same way.” He was looking around, his own eyes going slightly vague even as she watched him, as the drops took effect. “I’m hoping this is close enough to let me see what he’s showing.”

“But are we sure he’s even… _him_ in there?” Maria didn’t quite know how to ask the question. “I mean, just because you’re getting flashes of whatever it is you’re getting flashes of, doesn’t mean there’s any conscious will behind it.”

Stark rolled himself forward—which looked like it hurt like a bitch—and nodded to the monitor. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

“Tony, one thing,” Dr. Banner said, leaning in closer and letting the camera pick him up. “I’ve been going through the Sapience files, and I think Steve was your dad’s first trial.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it means anything—the project took a huge left turn after the war, thanks to some help from a Russian named Markovoskia, so I don’t know if Steve’d really know anything that’d help—but it might explain why he was fixated on it.”

Stark nodded again. “Might explain some of what I saw already, too. It'll be good to see what he knows about the beginning, though.” He grinned, obviously thinking about the appropriateness of his verb. If all Rogers could do was communicate in pictures, though, how were they going to find out anything?

“Keep reading,” Stark ordered them quietly, as Pepper appeared behind him to take the handles of his chair. “I’ll get back to you.”

The comm screen they were using went blank and shuffled itself off to the side of the wall, and Banner went back to the paper files he’d been reading through.

“Something else is going on,” he murmured quietly. “Something Tony knows that we don’t.”

Maria nodded in agreement, and sat down in front of her own files: the information on Providentia. Her crew from the International Space Station had promised her a status report. She put her hand to her headset and opened a line. “I need the ISS on the line. Right now.”

* * * * * * * * *

Pepper wheeled Tony into the interrogation room with his eyes closed. He didn’t know why. There was no reason not to have them open—except that it was weird for the world to be so unfocused again. He was just… reluctant to admit that he might be wrong about this.

“Okay, Tony,” Pepper murmured.

“Yeah,” he agreed, steeling himself. _Okay, Tony…_ The connection he had with Rogers tugged at him almost physically, now they were back in the same room together, and the difference from the feeling of the pings disturbed him. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

He definitely wasn’t wrong about this.

“Oh my God.” The room was full. Full of images and people and things… like a million holographic viewers going on endless loops, all in this one room. Maybe—hopefully—every memory Rogers had… “I’m gonna have a headache after this,” he muttered.

“What do you see?” Pepper asked, still in that low, quiet tone.

“Um… I think I see _him_ ,” he replied, trying to explain to himself as much as her. “It’s like his entire history is just…” He waved an arm as much as his injuries would let him. “Here.”

One image came clearer than the rest, and Tony’s heart skipped a beat. A red and gold blur, falling through the Manhattan sky.

“Tony?” Pepper put a hand on his shoulder, anchoring him.

“I’ll be damned,” he whispered. Tony raised his voice. “Rogers? Can you hear me?”

A red and gold blur, falling through the Manhattan sky. The big guy leaped from a building, capturing it— _him_ —in midair and rolling him to the ground.

Thor and the Hulk stood guard while Rogers knelt beside a battered suit, his face turned away as if to deny it. Hulk let out a silent, angry bellow.

 _Shit._ Tony tried to catch his breath and figure out what Rogers was trying to say. Too many images from that day shot through him from his own brain, and he felt himself start to panic. Stars and silence and being utterly, utterly alone...

The image in the room was now his own face, this time looking beaten and burned, eyes vague; blackened, bandaged hands around his neck—

“I’m not dead, Cap,” he called quickly, panic draining as he realized where Rogers’s mind was. “I’m not dead. I’m right here.”

The images faded back into the rest of the chaos and Tony tried to slow his heartbeat.

“That’s better,” he murmured. He took a minute to try to figure out if there were other images he could see more clearly, but aside from reacting to his voice and sort of asking the question of whether he was okay, Rogers seemed to be in free association mode. Nothing popped out because he wasn’t focused on anything.

But maybe Tony could change that.

“Steve?” _Keep it simple. No telling how much he can understand._ “Do you know what’s going on?”

Tony was suddenly bombarded by images: the sphere, his suit glowing blue, his own body flung back, war and death and destruction and—

“STOP!” he cried out, the words bouncing off the armored walls.

Every image in the room lost a bit of saturation, as if Rogers had put himself on mute. Tony still shut his eyes, unable to confront any of it right this moment. It was too much after the blinding reminder of New York... _Okay, maybe specific is better,_ he thought to himself wryly, trying to calm down.

“Tony? Tony, can you hear me?” Pepper was kneeling in front of him, vaguely in focus if he looked at her from just the right angle. How long had she been calling to him? Her hand was on his and she looked shaken.

Probably not as shaken as he did, though.

He wondered about how weird it must be for her and the guards that were in here with them. For them, this was just a plain, gray room. For him, it was more information than he could handle. And all this stress wasn’t helping him feel any less crappy. Richardson and Halburt hadn’t been kidding when they warned him about exposure like this.

“Give me a sec.” He needed more than a sec, but he couldn’t afford it.

“Slowly, Steve,” he said finally, hoping Rogers _could_ slow it down. “Forget the sphere. Forget the field. Forget the killing.” He waited a moment and watched in wonder while the images around him shifted.

The one image that took center stage wasn’t one Tony ever wanted to see. It was something he was sure Steve Rogers had never wanted anyone to know—he couldn’t even be sure Steve _meant_ to show it to him.

In a cavern of ice with twisted steel walls, Steve Rogers’s own body lay half frozen, his face screwed up in pain… while his eyes blinked, searching for something they couldn't find.

“Jesus,” Tony whispered. He’d always just assumed, from what his dad said all those years ago—from what the news reports had said when they found him—that Rogers had just… frozen. Fallen asleep and woken up 67 years later. _Fallen asleep…_ He closed his eyes again.

It was like watching yourself slowly die, no matter how hard you tried to stop it. Like shoving plate after plate of palladium into your chest, knowing, eventually, none of it would make any difference. One day you’d fall asleep and never wake up. You were dead. You just hadn’t stopped moving yet.

 _Get a grip, Tony,_ he schooled himself, stuffing it back in the box. _For once in your life, this isn’t about you._ The fact that, in one sense, it was _all_ about him was one he was working hard to ignore right now, as the energy continued to drain from him. He needed information, which meant he needed to be here, no matter how dangerous that was.

He opened his eyes and waved Pepper off. He wasn’t explaining what he’d seen. It wasn’t his to see in the first place—he’d forget it the second he could.

“Right, Steve,” he said, agreeing with the vision’s message and keeping his voice steady, wondering if Rogers heard his voice at all in any conventional sense. “They’re keeping your body paralyzed until we can figure out how to get the database out of you.” He was heartened when the image faded back into the noise and another one crystallized, showing just the sphere, as if he was waiting for more information. “It’s a computer, Steve,” Tony told him. “Manmade.”

After a long moment, his father appeared, and Tony chuckled blackly. “Yeah, Dad. Would you believe it?”

A scene played out in the space of the room. His father, properly showy, on some old-time stage with the repulsor car that still sat in the garage at the mansion. The car rose a foot in the air—and slammed back down hard.

Tony all out laughed, clutching his chest.

“Okay, maybe you would. He never did get it to work right. I nearly squished the nanny with it when I was eight.”

God. This was going to work. This was better than the pings that had been so frustrating to figure out. As long as he could catch the references Steve was making, this was like being shown _exactly_ what Rogers was thinking.

It was also incredibly exhausting. It wasn’t chunks of information, little bursts of data. This was the whole of Rogers’s mind, radiating out from him constantly. Literally. Tony closed his eyes again for a moment, just to get a rest from the unrelenting movies that bombarded him. Even on “mute”, it was still 4 million television sets at once.

“What do you remember about Project Sapience?” he asked after a couple of minutes, opening his eyes to see the answer.

The stage receded and the same windowless lab he’d seen before replaced it. Rogers stood before a cathode ray screen with a cap on his head with about a thousand leads trailing down to a circuit board covered in vacuum tubes.

“Stylish,” Tony murmured.

Bucky Barnes appeared at one side, laughing. It was as good as saying, "I've been mocked by better."

“Sorry,” Tony apologized. “Go on. I’m listening.”

Rogers leaned in to the screen and said something. Tony’s dad replied. Rogers stood tall, closed his eyes, waited a long minute, and opened one eye. At the disappointed look on the elder Stark’s face, Barnes laughed hard enough that it looked like he hurt himself.

“Right,” Tony agreed quietly. “He scrapped the project a few years after you disappeared.” He swallowed hard at the memory of Steve’s time in the ice. He sort of wished he didn’t have that in his brain. “He couldn’t get it to work.”

A series of images came and went, all similar. Sometimes Peggy Carter was there, but mostly the constants were his dad, Steve, and the uncooperative monitor.

The final scene had a startlingly young Tim Dugan in attendance, but this time, when Steve closed his eyes, a word appeared on the screen. _BEER._ All three men laughed.

"He _did_ get it to work," Tony muttered. "Why couldn't he get beyond the first phase, then?"

God his head was aching. Even Rogers’s brain images were starting to blur. He blinked a few times, trying to pay attention. He needed to get out of here, but he wanted to see what would happen next.

He should have been careful what he wished for. Steve and Peggy and Dad were in the same room but Dad was the one with the hat on his head. He nodded to Peggy, who typed something into the keyboard… A shower of sparks rained from the connection between the circuit board and the wires, and Dad fell to the ground like his strings had been cut.

“What the hell?” Tony held his breath as Steve dropped to the ground beside Dad and started CPR, his face panicked and grief-stricken. “He couldn’t take the energy of it, could he?” he asked quietly. _Dad nearly killed himself with this thing? And kept working on it!?_ “So why didn’t he scrap it altogether?”

The scene changed and Steve was back in the hat. Rogers closed his eyes again. Dad, hale and hearty as ever, said something that looked like “don’t peek,” typed on a nearby keyboard. The words _DANCING GIRLS_ appeared on the screen.

And the image of Steve Rogers blushed and opened his eyes in shock.

It could plant thoughts, too? The _prototype_ ? His father had created adaptech in **_1944_**?

* * * * * * * * *

“Oh my God,” Tony whispered, sounding devastated.

Pepper moved forward again, having retreated to the wall with the guards to watch the completely bizarre one-sided conversation that Tony had been having since they walked in the door nearly an hour ago. He'd been looking paler and shakier with every minute, but this was the last straw. She was getting him out of here.

“Tony, what is it?” she asked, kneeling in front of his wheelchair again as he stared at nothing. And this time he did seem to be staring at nothing, not at the images that were only visible to him.

“I think my dad really was smarter than me,” he whispered, as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear.

Pepper straightened up, blowing out a breath in annoyance. “I’m sure that’s a huge blow to your ego.” And she was sure he was going to explain exactly what he meant by that, too. She put a hand on his head, disturbed to find he had a fever. “You need to take a break.”

He nodded in agreement, which surprised her, and then grinned slightly at something only he could see. “Yeah, I’m about that tired, Cap. I’ll be back.” He saw something else and frowned.

And then he let her wheel him out and into the observation room down the hall, which, at some point in the last hour, had been set up with a gurney and medical equipment. Richardson stood by a monitor whose data she couldn’t see from this angle, his face implacable. Pepper looked at Tony, anger building when he didn't seem the least bit surprised.

"If you’re not in there, you’re lying down," the doctor demanded. "You can talk just as well from a bed."

Tony silently climbed from the wheelchair to the gurney and laid down.

That quiet acquiescence disturbed her more than the fact that he’d just spent the last hour talking to himself in an empty room with a comatose patient. Tony didn’t listen to doctors. Ever. He’d be on his death bed and telling them to go away, like last year after the palladium poisoning…

“How much radiation did you get, Tony?” she asked softly.

Tony kept his eyes closed and Richardson tightened his lips.

“Damn it, Tony, _how much_?” she grated. He was doing it again. God damn him!

“Steve’s communicating on a near-gamma frequency,” Tony muttered quietly, too tired for once to lie to her. God knew he’d lie to her just fine when he had the energy for it! “Most of the radiation that got through the suit when the glove came off…”

“Was on the same frequency,” she finished. She just stared at him. “Were you going to tell me this time? Or were you just going to wait until you’d ‘fixed things’ again? Or dropped dead?”

She swore she heard him mutter, “Again,” after that, but he opened his eyes and tried to at least stare in her general direction. “It wasn’t much when he was just pinging—little bursts. We didn’t even notice at first.”

“But now he’s broadcasting continuously.” She turned her back on him, focusing on Richardson and letting him know by the look on her face that he was _not_ going to lie to her. “How bad is it?”

Richardson looked behind her to Tony for a moment before he answered. “The contamination isn’t irreversible yet. As Mr. Stark said, the pings were relatively harmless in the long term—we wouldn’t even concern ourselves with them normally. Such a tiny level of radiation shouldn’t affect anyone permanently.”

Tony shook his head. “I didn’t figure it out until the database started using Steve's electrical system to control him and he started making more sense--he was using the radiation himself at that point. I was hoping that meant he couldn’t communicate because he’s in a shielded room, not because he was gone.”

“He’s still emitting low levels of near-gamma,” RIchardson picked up. Tony had fallen silent—mostly, she figured, because he knew she was too angry to listen to him. “It's a constant stream without the database to inhibit him. Again, it's nowhere near enough to cause damage to a normal person, unless they stayed in the room for a number of days. But because of his exposure to the sphere, Mr. Stark’s brain has become uniquely sensitized to the frequency. That, combined with the injuries he’s suffered and his previous radiation exposures...” He pursed his lips.

“Pepper—”

“I’m not talking to you right now, Tony,” she snapped without turning to him. She took a deep breath. God, she couldn’t believe he was doing this to her again. “How long until it _becomes_ irreversible?”

Richardson spread his hands. “Best guess is five to ten hours of exposure. If we could flush Captain Rogers’s system and remove the radiation—”

“You’d be killing him,” Tony snapped. He was weak, but even now, he wasn’t going to be ignored. Pepper reluctantly turned to face him.

“If we flush out the radiation—if that’s even possible—we remove the one storage medium he has left. The database has used up everything else.” Tony tried to focus on her, pleading. “Come on Pep, I’m the only link Steve has. We can't help him if he can't communicate.” As if she had any power at all in this situation—or any situation when it came to him.

And the worst part was, she couldn't even argue with him this time. Who was she kidding--she couldn't argue with him any time. Well, no, she should have killed him for not telling her he was dying last year, certainly. She supposed he had _tried_ to call before he drove a nuclear missile through a wormhole in the Manhattan sky...

She was seriously starting to wonder if the hero thing _was_ worth it after all.

* * * * * * * * *

After that one brief aberration--the random vision of Stark as he'd never seen him before--Steve floated in his endless visions for far too long. He had no anchors, no guideposts. Just endless memories, and too many of those that he'd rather forget.

> _Five, waking in terror to a quiet weeping he can't hear now.  
>  His mother kneeling by his father's side of the bed. His father far too motionless. _
> 
> _Ninety-three, running from a baseball game 70 years in the past.  
>  A world he couldn't begin to understand, but one he had no choice but to live in, surrounding him. _
> 
> _Twenty-one, trudging up the stairs to face an empty apartment  
>  where his mother would never be again. _

_Tony Stark. Haggard. Frightened._

Steve paused, painfully glad to see an image he didn't recognize. It didn't make sense, though. Tony was dead, wasn't he? Steve had killed him. Squeezed the life out of him?

_Ninety-four, at the side of a fallen hero, whose eyes snapped open in shock. Jokes and light-hearted banter he can't hear now accompanied Stark's recovery._

Not dead? Thank God!

Another image he didn't recognize from that angle seemed to appear before him: himself, eyes closed against the third worst physical pain he'd ever felt. Hand pressed into a sphere that was consuming him. That _had_ consumed him.

The image brought too many other recent memories to the front of his parade of images. Just when he was certain he would go insane from them, though, another image cut across, stopping everything.

_Hitting the deck as an explosion blasted through the floor of the helicarrier. He and Stark had grabbed for each other instinctively, protecting._

Funny that he didn't realize that when it happened. As self absorbed as Tony was, he did care about saving other people. Like Howard, he was just a little less obvious about it.

Steve took a mental breath and stood back from the slide show for a moment—something he’d never managed before. If he could have, he would have smiled.

Tony was actually _here_. He had to be. And he was trying to communicate.

Steve didn't understand how this new way of talking could work, but he had to try. He had to let Tony know he heard him. Had to find out what was going on. He couldn’t live trapped like this forever...

Unwanted, one image came back to him. He shrank from it, but it wouldn’t be denied. The ice and cold and hopelessness weren’t blunted in the least by a lack of touch or sound.

He wished he could figure out a way to order his thoughts here, but there was nothing to hang anything on. God, he didn’t want this.

It might get across his current situation—alone, adrift, frozen—but that moment in time wasn’t something anyone needed to know. Certainly not Tony Stark. 

A new image seemed to slide that one off to the side, like a data window on the computers Steve had never thought to live to see: Tony, tired, pale, staring at himself in the mirror, a bizarre tracery of poison under his skin, radiating out from the glowing reactor over his heart. Dying by inches.

He didn't think Stark was capable of that kind of despair. Maybe they had more in common than Steve thought.

The image faded away entirely, thank God, while his own memories stayed dimly in the background; a film seen from the wrong side of the projection screen. He wasn’t sorry to see it go.

Steve tried to keep his mind still, hoping for more, and sure enough, an image of the sphere appeared. After a moment, it was connected to one of Howard’s old computing machines and its clunky old keyboard. He tried to puzzle out the meaning and would have laughed if he could, once he figured it out.

The sphere was Earthly. Man made. Who the hell would _make that_?

Howard’s keyboard… Howard? It couldn’t have been intentional. It couldn’t. Howard wasn’t a sadist. No, he was just a master at almost too many technologies, who always did get ahead of himself. Look at that car he had. Cars certainly weren’t hovering two feet above the ground here in the twenty-first century, were they?

The incredible image of a scrawny black-haired boy trying to fly that same car as a matronly old woman tried to pull him out appeared in his mind and he wished again that he could laugh. Stark's son really was a chip off the old block.

Howard’s lab popped into being before him—the computing lab, not his military apps lab. The screen appeared. He’d grown to hate that screen over the months they’d been based in London.

He hated the stupid helmet more.

The helmet appeared as if called, and he remembered again the first time he’d worn it. Bucky had nearly hurt himself laughing. And of course, as with many of Howard’s inventions, it was a failure. At first. Every chance he got that whirlwind summer before the winter that spelled the end of Steve’s time in the twentieth century, Howard pulled him into that lab and put that stupid hat on him.

And then, finally, he and Dum Dum had a bet on that Howard was going to finally quit working on it. Move on to something else because he couldn’t get the thing to work. Ever. Howard had jammed the helmet on Steve’s head and demanded to know what they’d bet for.

BEER had appeared on the screen. And Dum Dum has had to buy the rounds that night.

A regurgitated image of that first trial appeared before him, and Steve tried to puzzle out why it was there. Because it failed? Did Tony think his dad’s project failed completely? 

BEER appeared again, followed by an image of the sphere that wasn’t glowing and obviously didn’t work anymore, and Steve figured out what the question was. _Why hadn’t Howard continued his experiments?_

Another memory Steve hated appeared, and he was sorry he’d have to show it to Tony at all. He knew Tony himself was known for being willing to throw self-preservation to the wind for his science, but Steve didn’t know if he knew that he was exactly like his father in that respect. He remembered the horror of watching Howard just… fall dead. Literally dead. Thank God they’d gotten him back, though. Steve had lost a lot in his life by that time, but the idea of losing Howard, too, had been too much.

The silence around him suddenly showed a flash of an inexplicable scene of Tony as a late teen, standing in the doorway of a mansion with Howard’s butler. A policeman was there, and the words he said made Jarvis gasp and Tony turn away….

The confusing vision was rapidly replaced with another of his own memories passed back to him: Howard and his car. _The experiment was a failure?_ Was that what Tony was asking?

But it wasn’t a failure, of course, because Howard was Howard. He kept at the damn thing, though he never used it on himself again, that Steve knew. No, he just tortured Steve with it. Fruitlessly.

Until one day, a thought popped into Steve’s head. Not even a thought. An image. Dancing girls. Bucky had teased him for weeks after that, while Howard tried to rope him into more experiments.

And then Bucky had died and everything came to a screeching halt.

_Tony. Exhausted. Lying on a gurney on the helicarrier as Dr. Richardson checked him over after New York._

Steve wondered how long Tony had been at this. He could be relentless. And pig-headed. He remembered the damn shawarma restaurant Tony had insisted they go to, though most of them were bleeding and raw and exhausted. Three quarters of a mile of Manhattan had just been half-leveled, they all needed a medic, and Tony Stark had insisted they stop for shawarma.

It was good, though.

_Tony Stark, pale, a bizarre tracery on his neck and chest. Dying._

Steve sobered immediately, worried. Why was that memory—not his memory—back again? What was Tony trying to tell him—or was it something that had leaked out, like his own frozen recollection?

He tried to ask, but no more pictures came.

After a while, when there was no more "communication" (such as it was) and he felt himself drifting again, he set about trying to keep some kind of focus. Tony would be back, he was sure. He wanted to be ready.

With more intention than he’d felt in far too long, Steve started ordering his thoughts. Like loading a carrel with slides. If he was right, Stark wanted to know about Sapience, so he tried to somehow collect those images. He had no idea if he was doing anything successfully, but it kept him from drifting into memories he had no interest in reliving.

Unfortunately, Sapience hadn’t lasted long—or at least he hadn’t been around to see it develop beyond the dancing girls. But there were other thoughts to order. Something Howard had said once about computing machines came back to him.

“Think of a computing machine as the biggest filing cabinet you’ve ever seen,” he said. “Now, you can stuff it full of anything—probably everything someday, if we can come up with a better way of storing information—but it's no good if you can't find anything once it's in there.” Howard had gotten that far-in-the-future look in his eyes and smiled. “You know, _homo sapiens_ have the largest brain capacity of any animal on Earth? Computers that take up rooms can be stored in a human mind. If we could build a system that efficient…?”

Maybe Howard actually _had_.

That memory brought more, and Steve simply tried to “file” them. It was something to do.

A memory of dinner with Peggy, her in that red dress of hers—the one she’d only worn once before he’d left her—floated through his mind. So, not _all_ his memories were ones he didn’t want to see.

It was a long time before he started to wonder where Tony had gone and when he’d be back....

* * * * * * * * *

Pepper ignored Tony until he drifted off. She didn't often stay angry at him like this, but...

But eventually he was going to lie to her about the danger one too many times and _not_ be around to ignore, wasn't he?

He dozed until Nick Fury stepped into the makeshift hospital room and just stared at him lying in his hospital bed. Richardson had given Tony a shot of some antioxidant compound that was designed to do for this radiation damage what the lithium dioxide had done for his palladium poisoning. He did seem better than he had when she rolled him out of the interrogation room, but that wasn’t actually saying much.

“You look like shit, Stark,” Fury said bluntly.

Pepper snorted in response. She watched the bed out of the corner of her eye, and Tony shrugged. Bastard.

“Richardson gave me the report,” he continued, making her seethe. Sure, Nick Fury got a report—she didn’t even get an apology! “You sure you want to do this?”

“No,” Tony said, so tired and even a little pathetic that Pepper turned back to him from where she’d been watching Steve not move on the monitor. “I don’t. But I don’t really have a choice.”

Fury nodded. “For now, let’s see what we can find out without anyone—especially you—having to go into that room.”

Leaving Steve alone, trapped inside a paralyzed body with a warmongering AI in his brain. Because there was always an “or worse.” Pepper sighed.

“I need to talk to Bruce about the AI,” Tony said, trying to sit up. Out of habit, Pepper reached out and raised the bed for him. He smiled timidly in thanks and she glared back. They were _not_ done talking about this. He ducked his head and cleared his throat. “Um, where is Hill on retrieving the satellite?”

“Our people have it,” Fury confirmed. “We were just waiting on you.”

“Let’s hope none of them is stupid enough to touch it,” Tony muttered, reaching for the monitor. His hand was only shaking a little as he pulled up a comm channel to his hospital room upstairs.

Bruce was sitting on the bed going through page after page of notes and files, and Maria was sitting at the desk on the other side of the room, leaning into her computer screen.

At least Bruce was smart enough to stay away from the danger zone, Pepper seethed. Tony? He just rushed right into it!

“The Sapience Project was adaptech,” Tony announced, trying to sound like he wasn’t suffering radiation poisoning. She’d been so angry about him lying to her—again—she hadn’t asked about that, but it did make sense. 

She remembered the history of tech she'd learned when she started with Stark Enterprises. Adaptechs had been the precursors to artificial intelligence: computers that learned to read and interpret—and in a few cases even induce changes in—human brain waves through an almost child-like, step-by-step process. They’d been infantile at best, but they were state-of-the-art in the mid-60s. And Howard had created one twenty years earlier? 

Maybe Tony’s dad _was_ smarter than him.

Bruce nodded from his seat on the bed. He had the tray pulled up and was using it as a desk while he read through the files. “It’s in the files. He had an idea that he could teach the computers to read minds, yeah—wasn’t exactly novel, even back then.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Tony said, in a sharp tone that made Pepper stand a little straighter and made Bruce look up from the papers in front of him. “It worked. On Steve.” Funny how he was calling him Steve all the time now. “It took what looked like weeks of teaching it, but he taught it to implant a thought directly into Steve's mind.”

Bruce shook his head and echoed Pepper’s thoughts. “That’s not possible.” He gestured to the piles of folders around him. “There’s nothing in the files that hints that he was even remotely successful on that side of it.”

“Steve remembers it working.” Tony was so certain. Pepper really wondered what he was seeing in that room.

“If it worked, then why didn’t he continue?” she asked, despite herself. “Why isn’t the success documented somewhere?”

“Steve was the only successful trial,” Tony said, something dark in his eyes. “And then Steve died.” There was a wealth of emotion there that Pepper couldn’t begin to name. “He only knows what happened before then.”

“Dr. Masters is on the line from the space station,” Maria called out quietly, breaking the mood. “He says he’s got the satellite and is hooked into the AI. Sort of.”

Tony straightened up painfully, shaking off whatever he’d been remembering. “That’s cryptic.” _If that wasn’t the pot calling the kettle…._ “Let’s talk to him.”

A tall, skinny black man appeared on the main comm window, with Bruce and Maria relegated to an inset in the lower right corner.

“Mr.Fury,” the man said, his manner shy and bookish. “I’ve seen a lot of weird things, but this…” He smiled self-effacingly. “Whoever built this was a genius. Insane, but a genius.”

Tony grinned. “I’ve heard that—not just about him.” He took a deep breath as Richardson gave him another injection. He looked instantly a little more alert and Pepper wondered blackly just what it was. “What did you find?”

“Well, it looks like the whole satellite was bombarded by both energy from the Chitauri weapons and radiation from the Tesseract itself. The entire thing was lit up. Made it easy to find.”

“Hill said you were able to plug into the AI?” Tony asked. Pepper could see him fighting to stay alert. 

“Not really.” He sighed and blushed a little. “It proved… reluctant… to interface.”

“Wasn’t too reluctant down here,” Tony muttered angrily. Pepper couldn’t help herself, even furious. She put a hand over his in comfort.

“Well, turned out we didn't need to worry about finding a way in.”

* * * * * * * * *

Bruce shook his head. Why did the guy have to be so dramatic? “You want to explain that?”

Masters moved out of the way and focused the camera on the receiving bay behind him. A small satellite floated there. The central mass was an oval about ten feet long and had two sets of solar wings. It looked like nothing so much as a dragonfly and exactly like the schematics they'd pulled up from the Providentia files. The body was made up of an armature with attachments for five dataspheres like the one on Sub Six. That was the only one missing, thank God. The whole thing was, in fact, glowing blue.

The camera zeroed in on a monitor just outside the bay, as Masters continued.

“The radiation it’s giving off is specific—near gamma.” Bruce nodded to himself—they already knew that—but he watched in concern as Tony flinched. “We tried about twenty different ways to access the thing until we were able to figure out that it’s now trying to transmit that way.”

“Did you translate it?” Tony asked. He sounded offended that they'd figured it out so quickly. But there was an undertone of hope to his words that gave Bruce pause. Like he saw a way out from something. Oh God… Tony hadn’t been completely shielded the whole time he’d been near the sphere, had he?

Bruce gestured silently to Maria Hill, who stood listening beside him, and she handed over her keyboard. He opened a terminal window in a bottom corner of the wall screen and typed away while he listened.

“We didn’t translate it,” Masters said ruefully. “It translated itself.”

Tony snorted softly. “Of course it did. Because it had a computer this time.”

“What is it saying?” Nick Fury wanted to know. Bruce smiled blackly. The Other Guy’d definitely be making an appearance if he was as angry as Fury was right now.

Again, Masters let the visuals do that talking, and Bruce sat away from the brain and radiation scans he’d pulled up to look at the comm. It still showed the monitor set into the wall outside of the holding bay where the satellite bobbed.

TRANSFER HOLDING, the screen read. CALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO

“So transfer the damn thing!” Fury snapped.

"I just wanted to make sure you got the full effect," Masters said. He reached out and tapped YES.

The monitor screen was filled with a cascade of images, too numerous to count and each too brief to focus on. It was like one tremendous databurst.

An awful lot like the descriptions of the theoretical Sapience databursts that Howard Stark had written in his files, in fact.

“There’s sound, too,” Masters said. “It’s… enough to make your ears bleed.”

“And no one there has been affected by it?” Tony asked sharply. Bruce looked at the scans in the corner of the screen—the scans of Tony’s brain, not Steve’s—and ground his teeth. He couldn’t be angry at Tony for not telling them. He snorted in amusement. Yeah, getting mad would definitely not help matters.

“It’s been thoroughly shielded the entire time.” Masters didn’t understand the gravity of what he was saying, but Bruce could see that Tony—and especially Pepper—did. She had to be pissed. “No one here has been exposed.”

“Aren’t you the lucky ones,” Tony murmured, looking green.

“This is all we can get from the AI,” Masters continued. “We’ve got the computers here slowing down and trying to parse the data, but so far, it looks like mostly war statistics. Troop movements, arms information…”

“That’s probably all there is,” Bruce said, taking over to give Tony a minute he seemed to need. “Is there a way for you to sequester a portion of your computer system and port the AI into it? We have most of its data. It’s the brain we’re missing.”

“Jarvis can talk to it,” Tony offered, recovered enough. “Can’t you, Jarvis?”

“Must I, sir?”

Bruce grinned. Jarvis was as annoying as his creator, sometimes. Created in his image…

“Oh God…” he whispered, the answer coming to him in a flash. “That’s it.”

* * * * * * * * *

Tony sat up, glad the second shot of whatever-it-was was making him feel at least a little more stable.

“What, Bruce?” he asked, watching as his friend dug through one of the Sapience boxes and came up with a thick sheaf of papers.

“Markovoskia theorized that if you could create a neural interface designed specifically for the person you were implanting the data into, that person would instinctively wrap his head around the data.” He looked at the page before him for a minute. “Howard brought her on board because he wasn’t able to map the brain well enough himself to perfect the porting mechanism. His notes said he’d patterned the initial mechanism after his own thought patterns and assumed neural connections. But every simulation was always a bust.”

“But it _wasn’t_ his brain,” Tony broke in. “Dad nearly died when he tried it on himself.” 

“That makes sense,” Bruce said, an edge of hope to his words, though he frowned slightly at Tony’s revelation. “It must have been Steve—whose whole makeup is about adaptation. The reason they couldn’t get Sapience to work on anyone else was because the stress of the adaptive process would’ve killed the person before the transfer could even take place.”

Tony finally found something to smile about. Maybe. “Unless the person was already modified to be almost infinitely adaptable.” He chuckled, but it had a shocked edge to it. “The computer didn’t learn to read Steve. _He_ learned to control the computer. They just didn’t realize it at the time.”

Bruce froze, and Tony watched him think through the implications. “Erskine’s super soldier serum _was_ one of the earliest experiments in cellular restabilization. It’s possible...”

Tony drew a sharp breath, ignoring the flare of pain in his chest. That would mean… No. It wouldn’t work.

“If we reboot,” he said quickly. “He’d just be a blank hard drive.”

“Except that the near gamma you’ve been absorbing all this time is him, right?” Bruce said. There was a slight tone of condemnation there that Tony chose to overlook. No, he hadn’t told them he was probably dying again of radiation poisoning—again. And no, he wasn’t going to apologize.

To Bruce anyway, he qualified, looking at Pepper and the angry set of her lips.

He shook his head. “The radiation sucks as a storage medium—even the AI only used it short-term. It’s gotta be a relay now—a communication medium only. If he’s still in there, he’s chemical. Electrical.”

Tony reached forward to the monitor, ignoring the fact that his hand was shaking again, and brought up a copy of the scan of Rogers’s brain from right after the database took over.

“The size of a human soul,” he whispered, staring at the small blue holes hiding amid the red of electrical overload.

“Somebody want to explain to me exactly what the hell all this means?” Fury growled.

“Look at it as a backup file, sir,” Maria Hill cut in over the comm line. Had Tony known she was so quick on the draw? He’d have to hack her file sometime. “Captain Rogers—however he managed to do it—is locked off in one small area. Intact, from the sound of it.”

Tony nodded, thinking of the room down the hall, full of one man’s life. “Intact and conscious, I think.” And communicating two way, if that last image Tony had seen was any indication. Tony hadn’t said anything about radiation at all, and yet Steve had shown him an image of himself from when he had palladium poisoning—and that happened when Steve had still been frozen. He’d have to test his theory when he went in next, but Steve _had_ to know he was actually talking to someone who was listening.

“Human brain doesn’t work like that,” Fury griped.

“Apparently, it does, sir,” Hill stated. “At least in conjunction with the radiation he and Mr. Stark were exposed to.” Ok, really? Why was _she_ mad at him? She didn’t even _like_ him!

Fury pursed his lips. At least _he_ just seemed pissed that this was over his head. “So what do we do, then? Shut him off?”

“No, killing him won’t help at this point.” Bruce’s blunt comment drew stares all around, but Tony knew exactly what he meant.

“Shutting him off,” he continued for Banner. “Powering down. Rebooting him. Whatever you want to call it. It won’t help. The radiation and electrical impulses are interfeeding—If we stopped his heart and brain and brought him back, the program would still be there and we’d just get more of the same.”

“And probably less of him,” Bruce put in. Tony nodded in agreement. They had to find another answer.

* * * * * * * * *

“Okay, now, explain that.”

Maria shook her head at Director Fury’s biting command. He hated things he didn’t understand. She mused silently on all this new information. If Rogers could manipulate the original computer...

“Decreasing the electrical throughput in the system will weaken the part of his brain that’s still him,” Dr. Banner explained patiently. “Look, a human mind shouldn’t be able to defensively rewrite a portion of itself as a backup drive. I’m betting that Steve’s superhuman status and the radiation and reprogramming provided by the datasphere are what enabled him to do it. But his mind—what makes him _him_ —is really still just a collection of chemical and electrical impulses.”

"Mutated by radiation..." Maria whispered.

"Wait, what?"

She looked up at Stark's sharp question. He was sitting forward—in what she'd come to think of as his scientific attack dog mode—and trying to stare at her with unfocused eyes. She was suddenly flustered, which she really hated.

"Well, the radiation boosted him enough to create the backup drive, right? And he was able to instinctively influence the original Sapience computer with no aid. Maybe the radiation itself could boost him enough to write over this database—or at least shut down the AI. He’d just have to be told what to do."

All three connected rooms were silent for a very long moment.

“Agent Hill, why don’t you give up your life of espionage and work for me,” Stark said finally, causing her to flush. Maria smiled to herself for all of five seconds. It was a good five seconds, though. “She's right. We might need to inject more radiation into the system, but..."

"You really think he can reprogram it from the inside?" Masters seemed more than unsure of that.

"He did it seventy years ago," Stark put in. "And like Hill said, he didn't even know he was doing it."

Dr. Banner sat back, thinking hard if the furrow of his brow was any indication. "We need another scan," he said quietly. "Constant monitoring from this point on, to make sure this is working."

"And he needs to know his target."

Now why did Stark's statement fill her with a sudden dread?

Pepper turned on him. "Tony, you can't go back in there--especially if they flood him with _more_ radiation."

Maria swore she saw a flush of panic in Stark’s face before he got control of himself.

"Jarvis?" he called, sounding fitter than he looked.

"Sir?"

"Torch the hard drive in the Mark VII and make yourself comfortable."

"Of course, sir."

The suit would definitely protect him. But would it let them communicate?

"You’ll have to play with the level of shielding in the suit to get the right balance between communication and protection,” Banner told him, mirroring Maria’s thoughts. “But Jarvis could monitor you and that.”

Banner was clearly nervous about the amount of radiation they might have to deal with here. She wondered if he might be safer off-site.

And then she wondered if he’d be willing to leave.

“Once he’s in there, he’s going to have to stay there,” Richardson announced, bothered by the whole idea. “If we’re going to have to flood the room, we’ll need to keep it tightly sealed to prevent radiation leakage.” He pegged Stark with a serious glare. “If something goes wrong, we won’t be able to pull you out quickly.”

“Jarvis?” Stark asked.

“The Mark VII is now rated to protect its wearer from in excess of 1500 rems.” _Now rated_ , Maria thought with an edge of dark amusement. Stark must have added extra shielding after New York...

“That would do it,” Banner said quietly. “Steve’d be dead long before that, even with his resistance to that particular wavelength.” In response to the various curious stares he got, he explained, “Howard Stark called them ‘vita-rays.’ It’s essentially the narrow band of wavelengths between X-rays and gamma rays. They’re what created Captain America in the first place.”

“And it’s like his body instinctively knows how to use them,” Stark murmured, impressed.

Banner’s jaw clenched. Maria figured _he_ was more jealous than impressed.

“All right, then,” Stark said, levering himself up to dangle his feet off the edge of the bed. “Let’s get started then. Jarvis, is my suit ready yet?”

“Nearly, sir.”

“Great,” Stark replied, though his enthusiasm was somewhat lacking. He snorted suddenly. “He doesn’t even understand how modern computers work, how am I going to explain this to him?”

“He’s a quick study, Mr. Stark,” Maria assured him. Steve Rogers was an intelligent man—and curious—and her source said he’d been working hard to get himself into the twenty-first century. She was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to advance quite this far, though. “And technically, he’s working with an antiquated system.”

“Nothing Dad did was ever antiquated. Speaking of, keep digging through those files and see what you can find. Masters, Jarvis is going to upload the sequester and cloning protocols to you now. I still want to see that thing when we’re done rewriting Steve’s brain.”

“We’ll take care of it, Mr. Stark,” Masters said. He looked into the camera with an earnest stare. “Good luck.”

“Yeah,” Stark said, as the comm session reduced itself to the two rooms 50 floors from each other. He looked up at the monitor and Maria saw him try to zero in on something. “Bruce? It might be better if you were… you know—far away?”

Banner smiled, but she could feel his nervousness. “That subbasement has the most extensive shielding of any complex in the world, Tony,” he began. “And it hasn’t bothered the Other Guy yet.”

“Please.” Maria had rarely seen Stark so serious. “Get back to the Tower. Jarvis’ll make sure you see everything.” He smirked, but it was strained. “Better safe than sorry, right?”

Banner shook his head. “Too late for that.” He looked up at Maria, and she could see the worry in his eyes. For a man who needed to keep such a tight rein on his anger, he certainly let every other emotion hang right out there for everyone to see. “Can somebody give me a ride?”

“Of course, Dr. Banner,” she said.

Richardson looked supremely uncomfortable with the whole idea, but he must have realized quickly that they didn’t have much of a choice and Stark wouldn’t be deterred anyway. “I’ll be monitoring your vitals through your computer very closely, Mr. Stark,” he said gravely. Maria almost felt sorry for him. He was trying to save the life of a man who, she'd come to realize, didn’t really care if he died, so long as his objective was accomplished.

“We need to talk before you go in there,” Pepper said. It sounded low and dangerous, and Stark was a moron if he didn’t see that he’d damn well better listen to her. _He_ might not care if he died, but she sure as hell did.

“Right,” he said quietly, and Maria smiled. Not a moron. 

“All right, clear the room and let’s get to work, people!” The director called, recognizing the threat in Pepper’s words as clearly as the rest of them did.

The comm went dark, and Maria was glad she wasn’t a fly on the wall in that room. She had a feeling what Pepper was going to say wouldn’t bear repeating.

“I’ve seen Pepper pissed off before,” Banner said, a smile playing on his lips. “It’s not a pretty sight.”

Maria grinned back. “Let’s get you a chopper to New York, Dr. Banner.”

She wasn’t the least bit surprised when he ducked his head almost bashfully. “Yeah, about that…”

* * * * * * * * *

Fury had all but shoved everyone out of the room and closed the door, and Pepper stood there and stared at Tony, who was sitting on the edge of his bed looking sick. She was shaking again. Contrary to everyone’s assumptions, it wasn’t from anger.

“Tony—”

“Pepper, don’t,” he said, in that no nonsense tone of his that meant he wasn’t going to be sane about this or rational about this or anything other than completely _Tony_ about this. “We don’t have a lot of choices here and we don’t have a lot of time. So can we maybe just—”

“I’m not asking you not to do it,” she broke in, before he could get on a roll.

“Oh.” He sat and looked at his hands, completely nonplussed.

“He needs you in there, and I get that, but Tony—” She grabbed his chin and made him look up at her. “Just remember that I need you out here, too, okay?” 

“Understood,” he said meekly. They stared at each other for a long moment. 

“You’re an asshole for not telling me again. You get that, right?”

Tony seemed to consider it. “Kind of thought the asshole was a given, whether I’d told you or not.”

“Tony…” God, _why_ was she in a relationship with him again? 

“Mom hated secrets,” he said, in an almost conversational tone, staring blankly at the corner of the room. “Told Dad if he ever so much as hid what he’d gotten her for Christmas, she’d divorce him.”

Pepper paused at the seeming non sequitur. 

“He still did it.” Tony gazed up at her, a wealth of emotion in his eyes. “He couldn’t help it. Said it was for her own good. She’d enjoy it more if she didn’t know.” He looked down, staring at his hands. “Sometimes it’s safer that way, too.”

“Some people don’t like surprises, Tony,” she whispered, holding his head in her own hands. “And I don’t stay with you just so I can enjoy myself.” She snorted. “God knows I don’t stay with you because it’s safe!”

“Yeah. Not so much,” he shot back. “Why _do_ you stay with me, anyway?”

“A question for the ages,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around his head and bringing him into her chest. “If it won’t work, you’ll know at some point, right?”

“It’ll work,” he muttered, pulling away after a long moment.

“If it _won’t_ ,” she repeated. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I can’t be stupid,” he replied. “Genius. The very definition of not stupid.”

She smiled and bent down to give him a long, slow kiss and tried not to think about every last kiss she’d ever given him. At least this time, she was _here_ , right? She knew it for what it might be?

Why didn’t that make her feel any better?

“Don’t be stupid,” she said again.

“Right,” he agreed, giving her that absent smile that simultaneously made her love him more and wonder why she bothered. “Not stupid. Check.”

“Sir,” Jarvis broke in—always with the worst timing. “The Mark VII is ready for you.”

Tony braced himself, and Pepper hoped the fear in his eyes would make him just a little less foolhardy this time.

“All right, then. Let’s get this show on the road.”

* * * * * * * * *

_to be continued..._


	10. Chapter 10

The show took a little longer to get on the road than Tony had planned. Richardson wanted him at least seated and resting while the scans were completed on Steve. The neurologist, Halburt, also insisted on another brain scan for Tony, but that only told them what they already knew: this was dangerous and they had to do it quickly. 

In light of their conversation, Tony didn’t protest when Pepper insisted on being there while Halburt discussed his findings. He just sat next to her and wished she wasn’t. It was somehow much easier to do things like this when she wasn’t watching him—and yes, he knew there was a lesson in there, but he really didn’t want to deal with it right at the moment.

Halburt explained that the sphere had initially attacked Tony’s brain directly. He didn’t have Steve’s ability to fight it off, so instead of burning off half his skin trying to get in, it went ahead and tried to torch his gray matter immediately. Now, every time he was exposed to the same kind of radiation it had put out, it had an ‘in’. A place to focus on. His motor cortex, mostly, though the sphere had also primed parts of his higher-level auditory processing centers.

“So I won’t be able to hear you when you yell at me,” Tony said quietly, bumping Pepper’s shoulder. “Nice.”

Halburt made a face and continued. “If it becomes necessary to expose you to more than the current radiation load, we can expect a number of side effects in relatively short order. Central nervous system dysfunction—specifically the motor functions we’ve already discussed. Delirium, memory loss, decreased mental acuity...”

“You forgot glowing in the dark,” Tony felt the need to quip. Pepper had his hand gripped tightly enough that he didn’t think she could tell his palms were sweating.

“Mr. Stark, I don’t think you understand the severity of this.” Halburt had a vein pulsing in his forehead. The fact that he could see it made Tony realize that, on top of everything else, he’d need another dose of eye drops.

“I understand it, Doctor,” he said, keeping his temper. “It just doesn’t actually matter right now.” That was the problem with doctors—they never saw the big picture. “So can we please just get on with this and stop scaring my girlfriend?”

“Dr. Halburt, you need to take a look at this.” A medtech strode into the room and commandeered the computer. There was an undertone of repressed excitement in her voice.

The monitor by Tony’s bed brought up two scans, side by side, and a slow smile built on his face. “Tell me that means what I think it does.”

Maria Hill stepped into the room and unobtrusively slipped around to look at the scans.

“The area is fully active now,” Halburt said, shocked as he pointed to a light green blob on the new brain scan that replaced the two smaller blue spots and some of the surrounding bright red tissue on the previous scan. The remainder of Steve’s brain was still in overdrive, but this area was… Steve. And growing. “Normal brain functions—well,  _ more _ normal, anyway.”

“He’s already started rewriting it,” Hill murmured, stunned. Tony wondered how sure she’d actually been that this would work.

“Like you said, he’s a quick study.” Tony chewed the inside of his lip in thought. “We just have to figure out how he’s doing it and let him know it’s working. And figure out how to take out the AI without him being collateral damage.”

“This is good news,” Halburt put in. “If he can already do what you’re saying he’s doing, there should be no need to put more radiation into the system.”

Tony breathed a sigh of thanks for that, but it didn’t stop what he had to do.

“Looks like it’s time for me to suit up,” he said quietly. Pepper looked like she wanted to say something, but held her tongue.  _ He _ wanted to say something, but couldn’t figure out what it was, so he held his, too.

His mom always said that silence killed a relationship. Tony could only pray she wasn’t right in his case. Although this stunt could kill it a lot more permanently, in which case he wouldn’t have to worry about it...

* * * * * * * * *

Steve was sick of his life. Memory after memory, silent and shifting, floated in his mind and he was sick of just sitting here watching it. Even before he’d met Erskine, he hadn’t dealt with doing nothing well. He couldn’t run and jump like the other kids, but he’d always done  _ something _ . 

A memory of himself and a ten-year-old Bucky, sitting in the tree that grew behind Bucky’s brownstone, slid past. They would sit up there for hours sometimes, thinking up stories, pretending they’d grow up and go on some Jules Verne adventure someday… God, he missed Bucky. He missed  _ everybody _ at this point.

And yeah, he was lonely. He was allowed to be. Even before whatever was happening now had happened, he’d been adrift. Everyone he’d ever cared about was either dead or getting there. He’d be 28 in a month, but his girl had turned 91 last week. 

Just to punish him, another scene he hated played out for him: Drinking to get drunk in a bombed out pub in East London, while Peggy tried to convince him that Bucky’s death wasn’t his fault.

Like Phil Coulson’s death wasn’t his fault. Like Manhattan wasn’t his fault.They weren’t, but he hadn’t done enough to stop them, had he? Wasn’t that why he’d gone through with Project Rebirth in the first place?

The movies in his head shifted without prompting, and he was looking at Tony Stark on the helicarrier, his face bland as he refused to admit that, sometimes, other people’s lives were just plain worth more than you were. Steve remembered (and why couldn’t he hear  _ something _ !?) Stark saying something about cutting the cord instead of lying on the grenade for the other guy.

And then Stark had gone and pulled Steve off that sphere. Without thinking about that fact that he could have died just as easily as Steve himself. Suddenly the image of Tony’s neck bruising and giving way under his own hands appeared, and Steve did what Steve did when things weren’t right or fair or just.

Steve Rogers got mad and started looking for someone to fight.

If he could just figure out who that was...

* * * * * * * * *

It was a relief to don the armor, in more ways than one. It would protect him from some of the radiation which, always a good thing, but it also took over most of the work of standing and walking, which he was already tired of doing and which he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to do at all if he stayed in that room much longer. 

Pepper gave him a long, last kiss on the lips and glared at him. “Don’t be stupid.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Please.”

“I don’t usually promise things like that,” he replied blithely, trying for normal.

“Yes you do,” she shot back. “Mean it this time, though. Okay?”

He gave her one long, last look and closed the facemask. He was shocked to find that, for once, he really  _ couldn’t _ promise. He didn’t want to lie. Something to pursue later, maybe. 

“Okay, Jarvis,” he said brightly, turning away and pretending his rear cameras didn’t pick up Pepper’s angry grimace. “Let’s go reprogram a super soldier.”

He’d make it up to her. He would.

Tony took a deep breath and walked into the cell, eyes closed until the vault door spun closed behind him.

“Radiation shielding is at 100 percent, sir,” Jarvis told him. Tony opened his eyes to a flat, boring, gray room.

“Decrease shielding to 75 percent,” he replied. Nothing. “50?” Nothing.

Shit. His palms started sweating again, but not with fear for himself. Well, okay, there was  _ some _ fear for himself. He really had been listening to the laundry list of Hell he had coming to him. But Steve Rogers had been fighting this damn thing the whole time. The least Tony could do was help him finish it off.

Or be there with him when it went the other way.

“Halburt, are you still getting activity up there?” he asked. 

“Activity is there and spreading slowly,” Halburt confirmed. 

Well, crap. He’d wondered if the suit’s alloy itself would interfere. He popped the seals on his helmet and flipped up the visor.

“Tony, what are you doing?” Pepper grated.

“I couldn’t see,” he murmured. Steve was still tightly bound to the gurney, his head now encircled by a halo that fed continuous data to the computers next door. He still looked mostly dead, but the room was again filled with light and movement. This was better. Brain-busting, but better. “Jarvis, ambient near gamma?” He was never calling them vita-rays, no matter what Bruce said.

“18 rems.” Okay, that was disturbing. Not normally life-threatening, but...

“May I remind you, Mr. Stark, that even low doses of radiation at this point are going to be increasingly dangerous?” Richardson scolded him.

“Sure. Do that,” Tony suggested, not really listening to himself or the doctor as he looked around. “What  _ have  _ you been doing, Captain Rogers?”

Steve had been busy. The room was still a few million slide projectors on overdrive, but some of the slides were… organized? He wasn’t sure he knew any other way to say it. They just looked put together, like Steve had grouped the memories to keep it tidy in here—or in his head, anyway.

An image took center stage without Tony’s prompting: His dad in the lab again, lecturing Steve on something. It probably would have been more effective if there was sound. Tony sucked at reading lips.

“Anybody know how I lead him into the speech centers of his brain?” he joked. The showcased memory of Steve frowned in irritation, but he closed his eyes, a look of concentration on his face. Tony’s dad said something else. 

A leggy blonde in Army brown stood before him, filing.

Bruce was suddenly on board the helicarrier, working his way through the data on the Tesseract and filing it away—

“Cleaning house?” Tony guessed finally. “Gives new meaning to filing that away for future reference.”

“Simulated Neural Reordering.” Hill sounded a little awed over the suit’s speakers. “That was part of what they were trying to do with the later versions of Sapience. Forcing the human brain to order itself enough to make room for the extra data.”

“And right now, he’s using it to untangle the knot he’s balled into,” Tony realized. And he was just doing it instinctively? “Wow. He really is kind of super, isn’t he? Or that was what Dad was teaching him all that time in the lab?”

The lab reappeared, Steve staring at Dad, impressed by something. “Yeah. I got it, Steve,” he grumbled. “Dad was smarter than me.”

Surprisingly, Steve seemed to have no response to that.

“Okay, um…” Tony started pacing, letting the suit do most of the work and still feeling like he was working too hard. “I’m going to use words and just hope this translates. The sphere has pretty much taken over your brain. Literally. But you knew that.” 

Steve and two men Tony had never seen before sat huddled in the dark, in a hole of some sort. Both of the men with him seemed injured, and Steve had a slice down the side of his face that hadn’t stopped bleeding. A pair of jack boots stalked past the opening of the hiding place, right at eye level.

_ Surrounded and in enemy territory _ . Tony wished they weren’t in the situation they were in, because this whole thing was amazing. If Bruce was right and Steve had no access to the speech centers in his brain, he was  _ still _ somehow managing to translate Tony’s words into something he could use and communicate back in pictures. And that would be really  _ cool _ if this weren’t a matter of both Tony and Steve’s life and death.

“What you’re doing is giving you some space to work, but to really win this thing, you’re going to need to take it out.”

Forties versions of Steve, Peggy Carter, Dad, some general, and Dad’s friend Tim Dugan stood, determined, around a large table with a map of Europe on it. There was a piece of glass over the map and that had been painted red in places where, presumably, the Germans or Hydra had control. 

Tony grinned. Steve knew exactly what he was up against. Somehow, he knew what he had to do.

“My work here is done,” Tony joked, ignoring the increased pounding in his head. “You seem to know exactly what’s going on, so clearly I’m not needed here.”

Steve was suddenly in a rain-soaked tent somewhere, that same general from the war room now looking at him dismissively as Steve was clearly begging for help. The resolute look that came over Steve’s face after the general turned away was also lonely. And scared.

“I was just joking about leaving,” he assured him, wondering why Captain America, of all people, had had to go it alone during the war. That was clearly what had happened. Tony resisted the urge to rub his forehead with a gloved hand. Great—the radiation was doing exactly what Halburt had said it would. He supposed a doctor could be right occasionally. . 

“Local radiation levels now at 23.5 rems and rising,” Jarvis informed him, unasked.

Well, that explained the headache. Why were the levels going up?

“Mr. Stark,” Halburt warned.

“Yeah, I got it, thanks.” He took a deep breath. Time to move things along. “Ok, look, Steve. We’re sort of running out of time here. You need to...” How did he explain that he needed to write over the damn program? Would Steve even be able to parse that into some image he could understand? Would he have been able to understand it in  _ words _ ?

An obnoxious-looking little man appeared, sneering in that way that people did when they had bigger and stronger people to fight their battles. “Mad scientist?” Tony ventured, wondering about the connection. “Or are we just calling him the AI’s avatar?”

Steve was suddenly with a small group of soldiers, looking down into a snow-covered valley, at a train barreling through the landscape. The image shifted quickly to the mad scientist, cornered and raising his hands in surrender. Funny. Tony would have thought that Schmidt would have been the baddie of choice...

“Okay,” Tony said reasonably. “So go get the little guy.”

The map table returned. This time Steve and the general were looking it over angrily. Trying to find something.

“Where is he?” Tony sighed. “That’s a little more complicated. We don’t know that.” He looked past the endless sea of memories and focused on Steve’s physical body as best he could with his eyes purposely disabled. “I’m betting you do, though. Somehow.”

The room held its breath for a long moment, and Tony found himself drawn to the now-background memory of Steve and the two injured soldiers. Steve and one of the men crouched, ready to run, and at the last minute, Steve slung the other, more injured, man over his shoulder. They crawled through the opening and ran for it, Steve keeping pace with the man beside him, though Tony knew from experience that he could have been half a mile away in an instant.

Steve fell hard, and though there was no sound to hear the bullet, Tony knew that was what had stopped him. Steve balled his hands into fists, pushed himself off the ground, took up the burden of his fellow soldier again, and ran on. 

The next time he fell, the memory darkened and melded into a vision of Barnes looking down at him, panicked. That melded into a nurse smiling down at him in a medical field tent.

Tony really wanted to know more of that story. Some other time.

“Come on, Captain,” he murmured, as the center of the room showed Steve and Peggy Carter sitting in the back of a plane, Steve looking scared but resolute. Tony could swear his dad was in the pilot seat…

The back of the plane opened, and Steve jumped out.

* * * * * * * * *

Steve wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he’d decided that, if he was going to get out of this himself, he was going to have to figure out where  _ here _ was. Figuratively speaking, of course.

The images from that horrible campaign in Angi came to mind. The place had been a maze! He and Dernier had gotten turned around in the middle of the firefight. Once they’d taken out the team of Hydra goons chasing them, Dernier had put his hand on the left wall and kept that wall on his left for the next forty minutes while they found their way out.

Why couldn’t this be that easy? If only—

_ Tony Stark suddenly breezed into the conference area on the main deck of the helicarrier as if he owned the place.  _

Finally! Now if Stark could just help him figure this out.

Howard was always good at that. Figuring things out was his goal in life, after all. Like the computing machines that were apparently at the root of this problem.

They’d done a few more tests after the dancing girls incident, and Howard had started trying to get him to “tell” the computing machine to flash three lights in a certain order. It never worked—mostly because Howard insisted that Steve didn’t have his own mind ordered, so how was he supposed to tell the machine what to do?

He’d said it was like the filing cabinet. Put everything in order and you could make the machine do what you wanted. Steve thought his filing cabinet was in pretty good order now. So how was Tony going to help him?

An image appeared  _ again _ : Philips was there in France, back when Steve was nothing but a monkey with a shield. Nobody had thought much of him then—super had been an epithet. 

Howard had been different. Steve was a friend, but also a weapon to be aimed in the right direction. Steve just wanted Tony’s help to do the same thing.

And suddenly Clint Barton was in Steve’s private theater, eyes shining that alien blue, put there by Tony somehow, surely. Why? Barton had been a weapon aimed at itself. But he’d chosen to move beyond what Loki had done to him, simply to make sure that Loki never did it to anyone else…

So the sphere was Loki in this scenario? 

Steve hadn’t meant to eavesdrop on Natasha and Barton after the Battle of New York, but he remembered Barton telling her that being taken by Loki was like being trapped in a box by the enemy.

Like that foxhole in Bavaria. There’d been no way out of there—surrounded by Hydra and the SS, stuck in a box…

_ He was in Manhattan, giving orders. Iron Man and Barton and Thor and Hulk and Natasha... _

Right, Tony. Back to work. 

But how was he supposed to do that? Back in the war, things had been simpler: find the base, attack the base, destroy the base. A group effort. This was more like finding Bucky behind enemy lines. On his own, and without any idea of how to get it done.

If the sphere were like Schmidt, he could just hit it head on. This was more like hunting down Zola. He wished he could laugh at the bizarre image of Zola as a malevolent sphere. But the sphere was just as slippery in its own way. They’d had to search half of Germany before they got a lead on him. Steve had a feeling this search was probably going to be just as hard.

But no harder than jumping out of a plane for the first time, straight into enemy territory. Maybe  _ that _ was the answer. Like trading these images with Stark? Instinct?

Maybe the trick was just to grab his shield and take a leap.

* * * * * * * * *

_ to be continued... _


	11. Chapter 11

“Stark, we have movement.”

Tony startled at Halburt’s voice in his ear. “Define movement,” he grated, watching Steve dive through the night sky, mortars lighting the clouds at intervals. His own head throbbed in time to the silent explosions.

“Normative electrical activity is increasing in the temporal and parietal lobes,” Halburt put in.

The scene went spinny as Steve neared the ground, the dark field like a kaleidoscope as it came up to meet him, hard. And still he all but hit the ground running. Like he literally couldn’t stop until he’d finished what he was trying to do. For a minute, Tony watched the Hydra base grow in the distance and tried to remember what that objective was.

God, his head hurt. 

_ Images of bodies hitting the ground, silent muzzle flashes... _

“The regularized area is expanding,” Halburt said, his voice fuzzy, like Tony’s vision had been when he’d woken up to this nightmare. “Encroaching on the superior frontal gyrus.”

“Ambient radiation levels now at 46.45 rems and rising,” Jarvis added helpfully. 

The HUD did the math for Tony, letting him know exactly how much of that radiation was getting to him through the open visor and how much his cumulative load was. Probably already too much, judging by the cotton he could feel growing in his head. 

“Movement. Right.” He swallowed down nausea and kept watching.

Steve was winning. Tony watched with increasingly blurred vision as Steve jumped from a catwalk, flames licking at him. It was ridiculous. Too many feet in the air, the objective too many yards away. It was like a dream of falling—except Steve’s memory had him sprawling safely on another catwalk on the other side of the manmade chasm. And getting up. But the world rose up in fire around him and the person he’d been leaping to meet, who stumbled with him as the catwalk shook silently. 

So maybe he was only mostly winning. But like the stubborn cuss he was, he was still fighting. Well, Tony knew from stubborn, didn’t he? He’d never have survived that first lovely electric waterboarding show in the desert if it wasn’t for stubborn.

Battles started appearing at random after a while—it became sort of hypnotic, and since Tony had nothing to do other than be the guy Steve could talk to if he needed to, all he could do was watch. Fights came and went, interspersed by the war room, Dad’s lab, a dark bar full of desperately tired men who were taking a break between campaigns. 

“73 rems and rising,” was the call from the radiation scorekeeper. 

Which was too much, but Tony kept trying to gauge whether Steve was still winning, even as he felt the world start sliding away from him a little bit. Made him feel like  _ he _ was the guy jumping out of the plane. “Why is the radiation going up so fast?” That didn’t seem safe, did it?

* * * * * * * * *

Bruce didn’t think so either, and the small note of confusion in Tony’s question was starting to worry him. The room was already too flooded for them to get him out, and Tony was being stubborn—which Bruce had learned pretty quickly was his default setting—and refusing to shut off Steve’s only line of communication. 

He supposed  _ he _ was equally stubborn though, wasn’t he? Because Bruce hadn’t actually gone anywhere. He was still in Tony’s hospital room, keeping an eye on the monitor, watching Tony in his suit and Steve strapped tight to his gurney, both in a blank room filled with increasing radiation. Which shouldn’t be happening. Steve could handle that load. Even injured, he should have been able to metabolize it. It was like he was doing the reverse of what his body had been engineered to do. Throwing it off instead of absorbing it like a sponge.

The fMRI live feed updated with a flicker, tracking Steve’s fight with the AI. He was making headway.

Which made him a threat all over again. Which would spur the AI to do what it could to hobble his advance. Well, that was a problem.

Bruce looked again at Tony’s vitals and Jarvis’s read on the amount of radiation Tony was actually absorbing. Of course, Tony’s head—where the radiation liked it best—was what was taking the hit, so even a little went a long way. 

And he knew Tony knew that, but a friendly reminder couldn’t hurt, right?

He tapped into the open channel Tony had been using, keeping his voice low and calm. “Tony, maybe you need to put your faceplate down.”

Because if he was right, and this was the AI’s doing and not just some side-effect, this was all going to get worse before it got better.

* * * * * * * * *

God, Steve was built for the sphere’s IA, wasn’t he? Tony mused a bit dully. All that war. War like the ones Tony had helped to create and continue all his life. Wars that had cost Yinsen’s family their lives. And Yinsen, too. 

And then he’d gone right on building the chaos, hadn’t he? Even as Iron Man? He hadn’t been back in the States for more than a couple of months before he almost got Pepper killed...

Hell, maybe Rogers was right. Maybe he was just a big man in a suit of armor, out for himself.

Words came to him through his earpiece, soft and a little garbled. “Tony, maybe you need to put your faceplate down.”

Bruce? What the hell was Bruce doing here? 

Steve was behind bars now. Really? On the other side of those bars was a guy who looked typically too young to be a soldier, strung up roughly while he was being worked over by men in Hydra uniforms. Steve yanked on the bars without moving them. Another of the Howling Commandos (Tony couldn’t remember which one) was there beside him, beaten pretty good himself and glaring in fury at the torturers in the room.

“Tony, did you hear me?” Bruce again. 

“Radiation levels are still rising awfully quickly.” Tony didn’t even know who said that. It was all so much white noise in a silent movie. A movie whose scenes had shifted again and were starting to go out of focus. 

Wait, how had they escaped from the prison? He’d gone to the proverbial popcorn stand and missed the crucial scene.

Now it was Steve and Dad, somewhere. Dad looked angry, even sad. Almost the look he’d get sometimes when Tony was a kid and Dad would drink too much and think about Cap and the good old days.

“Normative brain function is still spreading.” Broken signals through a busted radio.

“Hang on, Stark’s vitals are dropping.”

"Mr. Stark?" Halburt. "You're getting too much exposure." Obviously. "Can you hear me?" 

“We can’t unseal the room.” Hill?

The scenes were making less sense now, but Tony tried to keep following. The helicarrier. Bruce. Steve all up in his face while Tony gave as good as he got… The image of a coffin and a light as bright as the sphere had been.

“Tony, put your helmet on!” Pepper. He’d been glad she  _ hadn’t _ answered the phone in the end. He didn’t want his last memory of her voice sounding like Jarvis had when the suit had finally frozen to death in deep space, leaving Tony alone with a universe he didn’t want to know existed.

“Radiation levels now at 132 rems, sir.” Jarvis sounded worried. And staticky. 

Peggy Carter was nothing but an image in a compass case as ice engulfed Steve.

Amid the images and the din of too many voices yelling gibberish in his ear, came a clear sound Tony Stark never  _ ever _ wanted to hear again in his life. The aliens who had tried to destroy Manhattan had a very particular sound to them, really. Like an insect chittering, but on a bigger scale. Without thinking, he spun around, unsteady, aiming for the sound and firing his repulsor.

“Tony!” Why was he always making Pepper scream at him like that? That wasn’t what a good boyfriend did.

He watched, increasingly confused, as Steve’s now high-volume memory of flying through a window ahead of a Chitauri blast and landing hard on the top of a car continued on, unconcerned by the blackened wall behind it. Tony himself was suddenly a blur streaming past Steve’s position, leading a Chitauri ship behind him.

Bruce’s voice came through clear—mostly because he must have been shouting. “Jarvis! Seal the suit—NOW!”

—the big guy brought a fist down hard on the nose of that ship. The sound was almost crushing as it flipped, taking out a hundred yards of asphalt—

The faceplate slammed down hard and Tony’s teeth clacked together as he felt the suit’s venting system coming online. He should have been able to hear that, but the Chitauri’s crash had been  _ so loud _ !

He looked out into the room as the HUD came up, trying to figure out what was going on and why there was a really big red flashing meter in front of him and why the only thing he saw in the room was Steve, trapped in a web when they’d just been beating Loki’s ass in New York.

* * * * * * * * *

When Steve had  _ actually  _ jumped out of Howard Stark’s plane in the middle of enemy territory, he remembered thinking about Bucky. About what he was going to say to him when he found him—because he  _ was _ going to find him. Mostly because it just wasn’t right for someone like Bucky—someone who had always been Steve’s protector, his best friend, a good man who wanted to make sure justice was served—to die at the hands of the Nazis when Steve himself was safe and sound.

Little had he known that the Nazis were the least of their problems back then. Or that Hydra wouldn’t be the worst he’d face in his lifetime—however long that was going to turn out to be. Maybe if he was lucky and got out of this, he could have a little less war and a little more peace.

One of the images that he’d figured out wasn’t his own appeared, but it didn’t make any sense. Darkness, water, electrical sparks… What was that supposed to mean? A thin man, spectacled and spattered with blood, dying with a look of absolution on his face; a look Steve knew from too many guys he and his men got there too late to save.

But Tony Stark wasn’t a soldier. Of course, neither was his father. And still, Howard had done what he could to stop Schmidt and his army. Over and over again... Two years of war had seemed so endless.

Tony trudged through a desert, his head wrapped against the sun as his legs seemed to barely hold him up. He didn’t look like he was going to last long. But somehow he had, hadn’t he? Steve  _ had _ read his file. Tony Stark had no more right to have survived what he had than Steve himself did.

As if in response to his thought, Steve was bombarded by a cascade of moments he barely remembered. He knew, somewhere in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files, there was probably a record of the number of times he’d been shot. He didn’t know that number. He didn’t want to. But his mind seemed intent on showing him each and every one. It was relentless the way the sphere had been relentless.

Off to the side, if the theater could really have a side, the sarcophagus was open, syringes of blue injecting Erskine’s serum into his arms. It had hurt  _ a lot _ , but it hadn’t been the worst of it that day. He’d thought to himself at the time that he was scrawny enough to slide right out the bottom of it once it started setting itself upright to get ready for the vita-rays.

Something was changing… The images were drifting apart, slowly, as another memory that wasn't his came to him.

Stark, gray and half dead, frozen on a couch not as pale as his own skin. A tall bald man loomed over him like a gargoyle.

Sudden sound was almost frightening after so long without it.

“Your father, he helped give us the atomic bomb.” The man’s voice was oily. Evil the way Schmidt had been evil. “What kind of a world would it be today if he was as selfish as you?”

Tony was trapped. His eyes barely moved to track the glowing device that should have been keeping him alive. Steve wondered how he survived that.

“Too bad you had to involve Pepper in this,” the bald man’s evil voice continued. For that comment, it seemed like Tony could  _ almost _ force himself to move. “I would have preferred that she lived.” And the gargoyle was gone.

And Tony  _ was _ moving, fumbling desperately through what looked like a much more modern version of Howard’s lab, searching for a way to survive. A way to save someone else.

Steve remembered that helpless feeling. Rarest metal in the world or not, Howard hadn’t been the only man in the world with vibranium, and the bars of that Hydra cell, where he and Morita watched those bastards work Junior over, had insured that even Steve’s new strength couldn’t stop them from trying to take what they wanted.

“Tony, can you hear me?”

Steve didn’t see an image—nothing to connect with Dr. Banner’s voice, which sounded tinny and distant. 

“Radiation levels are still rising awfully quickly.” He didn’t recognize the voice this time at all, but he understood the concept.

Radiation. That had been something Howard had explained to him once, or at least Steve’s “unique relationship” to it. Hydra hadn’t been the elder Stark’s only objective—that oily voice had been right about him and the atomic bomb—and he’d received news about an accident back in the States.

_ “If a normal person gets hit with the radiation you got hit with, they’re dead. But what Erskine did for you allowed your body to absorb it safely. This new body is like that shield of yours, buddy. Unfortunately, it only protects  _ you _.” _

The images in Steve’s mind started to… twist… the whole theater tipping slightly off-kilter. Like the chaos that Loki started with his damn staff.

“Normative brain function is still spreading.” 

The words that were disconnected from everything only made it worse.

“Hang on, Stark’s vitals are dropping.”

"Mr. Stark? You're getting too much exposure. Can you hear me?" 

The next voice was Maria Hill, sounding tense and worried. “We can’t unseal the room.”

_ “Shut it down!” He could hear Peggy’s call even over his own screams in the Project Rebirth sarcophagus. “Shut it down!” _

“Tony, put your helmet on!” Stark’s girlfriend, sounding as terrified as she had been when she was finally able to reach him after New York.

Steve tried to grasp what was happening—inside his head and out. Something had gone dangerously wrong. More wrong. Stark was—

_ Floating in space, Pepper Potts nothing but a grainy, failing picture on the computer screen on the inside of his helmet. She was the last thing he focused on as the suit shut down.  _ So like his own memory of Peggy that Steve swore his own hand twitched. Funny how he thought he had nothing in common with Stark. 

Steve’s mind returned to the Battle of New York, now with full sound, which almost seemed wrong given what felt like a lifetime of silent movies. Seemed fitting, too, though. Maybe the fight that had brought him back to the world once would bring him back again.

They’d worked like a well oiled team, surprisingly. Not the Howling Commandos, but then, this was hardly the war. But it was on Steve’s home turf, and he’d be damned if he let someone lay waste to New York. That was what he’d gone into the ice to prevent in the first place.

An actual  _ physical _ explosion seemed to hit somewhere nearby, scaring the crap out of him for a second after so much time in frozen isolation.

“TONY!” 

Steve struggled to move, to react, to get the hell out of his head and find out what was going on. The movies in his mind continued, but he tried to push past them. Stark was out there, and he was in trouble.

“Jarvis!” Dr. Banner sounded almost panicked. “Seal the suit—NOW!”

The soundtrack of his movies went on, but there was silence in the world beyond them.

And somewhere in the world inside, somewhere that had been hidden by his drive to be heard…

There were whispers.

* * * * * * * * *

Pepper watched the frozen Iron Man suit and cursed the man she'd stupidly fallen in love with. It had been five minutes since Jarvis had obeyed Bruce in a way that he only ever obeyed Tony and herself, and locked Tony tightly away from the now lethal radiation levels in the room.

“In-suit radiation levels now at .25 rems and falling,” Jarvis announced, sounding almost humanly relieved. But Tony was still silent.

“Stark’s vitals are starting to stabilize,” Richardson announced, though it didn’t sound like that meant anything good in the long run. 

“Room’s at 216 and still rising,” one of the techs announced, less urgent than his last pronouncement. “Containment’s holding fine.”

Pepper let the words float around her, but her eyes stayed on Tony. She wasn’t calling to him. She just couldn’t find the voice to do it.

“What caused such a rapid climb?” Maria was wondering.

“The AI figured out Steve was using the radiation to communicate.” Bruce’s voice was quiet and worried over the voice link and Pepper was willing to bet he’d never left the building. 

“Can’t. ’S just a flim flam man…”

“Tony!” Maybe she  _ could _ find her voice after all. Pepper watched the monitor carefully, and though Tony was speaking, he wasn’t moving yet. “Tony can you hear me?”

“Jarvis, pump the volume, will you?” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard her at all. His words were slurring badly. “Feel like I’m in the bottom of a well.” 

“Tony, what to you mean a flim flam man?” Bruce asked into the ensuing silence. He spoke clearly and distinctly, and Pepper remembered that one of the things that Halburt had said would be affected was Tony’s hearing.

“Funny, Bruce,” Tony said, his voice a little stronger. Strong enough to show his anger. “You don’t  _ sound _ like you’re in Manhattan.”

“Sorry,” Bruce responded, sounding anything but.

“It’s barely an ANI,” Tony ground out, ignoring the insincere apology and clearly working hard to get the words to form. “We’re not talking Jarvis here. How could it know he was using the radiation?”

“The sphere may have been a low-level AI,” Bruce reminded him. “But Steve isn’t.”

Pepper took a full breath, finally, as the suit moved slightly when Tony shook his head. “Made it in his own image. Great.” The suit turned clumsily so that Tony was fully facing Steve’s unmoving body. “No way I’m watching him fight himself like some bad sixties scifi. Speaking of…” There was a moment of silence. “What’s going on? Jarvis, open the faceplate.”

“No!” Pepper snapped. 

Her call was overridden by Jarvis’s calm, “Ambient radiation is now at superlethal levels, sir. As you can see on the display before you.”

Pepper was worried maybe Tony  _ couldn’t _ see that at all. Or wasn’t understanding it. 

He sounded like a spoiled little boy when he spoke. “But I can’t see anything in here.” He reached up toward the manual catches on the helmet. 

“It’s the radiation,” Halburt murmured grimly. “He isn’t thinking straight.”

“Sir,” Jarvis said patiently. “I’m afraid radiation protocols forbid me from allowing the manual override to be implemented.”

“But what about Steve?” Tony asked, the child-like query breaking Pepper’s heart. 

“Let’s hope Steve can take care of himself,” Bruce replied. Pepper wasn’t sure at all that Bruce believed he could.

* * * * * * * * *

He didn’t fit in his body anymore, but he was pretty sure it was close to being his again.

He thought if he tried, he could move again; if there was something to hear out there, he’d hear it. It even felt like the place was bigger. He had more room around him—in his brain, he guessed.

It all felt wrong, though. Like those first moments after the sarcophagus, when he couldn’t get the hang of breathing with healthy lungs or standing on muscled legs. He needed to figure out how he fit here.

But first, he needed to find the source of the whispers. Be done with this once and for all.

And he didn’t need to rely on memory or images or sounds or anything. Just him and the damn sphere.

If he could find it. The whispers—still incomprehensible bugs in his brain—came from everywhere and nowhere. He’d somehow left the theater behind, and though he wasn’t exactly floating in nothing, he was in a place more like dreaming or sleeping than whatever he’d been doing before.

_ “Look, just pretend the buttons are under your fingers.” _

_ For Howard, everything sounded easy like that. Just pretend you’re pressing imaginary buttons that turn on lights. With a stupid helmet on your head. _

Steve’s fingers twitched, unseen by anyone.

_ “Moving your fingers isn’t going to help,” Howard told him, like he was a child. “Press them in your head.” _

Steve was well and truly sick of being in his head.

“Tony, what do you mean, a flim flam man?”

Dr. Banner’s voice sounded equally pedantic. It was like listening to the neighbor’s radio, turned up too loud. Tinny and thin, but clearly heard.

Steve fought to open his eyes and failed.

“Sorry,” Banner continued, the fragment as confusing as anything else around here. Why wasn’t Tony answering him?

“The sphere may have been a low-level AI, but Steve isn’t.” 

Now he wasn’t even making sense. Steve kept one ear on Banner and the other on the whispers. He wished he could fight this thing on real ground…

Before the army, before the war, before his mom died, Steve had had plans. You didn’t need to be strong and fit to be an artist, and Steve had always been a good one. He even dreamed in sketches sometimes. So somehow, it wasn’t a huge surprise when his brain decided to draw him some real ground an unreal distance from him: the lab area on the helicarrier.

“No!” 

His mind froze at the cry Pepper Potts gave out and he stopped marveling at the drawn space. Damn it, where  _ was _ Stark?

Instead of the man Steve was listening for, the computer, Jarvis, answered. But talking to Tony. “Ambient radiation is now at superlethal levels, sir. As you can see on the display before you.”

Superlethal. That didn’t sound good. 

“Sir,” Jarvis continued, talking to a child the way Banner had. Steve still wasn’t used to computers that sounded like they cared. “I’m afraid radiation protocols forbid me from allowing the manual override to be implemented.”

There was a long moment of silence. Was Tony speaking? He used to be the  _ only _ thing Steve could hear! 

“Let’s hope Steve can take care of himself.” Banner spoke, his voice that gentle sad one that Steve thought he used most of the time. The one that pitied the rest of them for not understanding that ultimately, there was no way out.

Steve smiled to himself as he moved confidently toward his own drawing.

_ Damn right I can. _

* * * * * * * * *

Bruce wasn’t a medical doctor by any means, but he had more than “first” aid knowledge and he knew more than almost anyone about how much radiation the human body could withstand. The brain was a little outside his wheelhouse, but this whole adventure was proving to be a crash course in neurology. 

Not something he would’ve chosen to study. Meditation and biofeedback were more his speed. What had Tony said once? “Mellow jazz? Bongo drums? Huge bag of weed?”

But he looked at the fMRI of Steve’s brain, trying hard to ignore the feed from Jarvis and the suit that was an infographic of how truly crappy Tony was feeling. He was showing signs of radiation sickness, and even with the suit locked up and doing the job of standing, being upright wasn’t helping him.

Steve’s brain looked a little like a yin yang symbol, if you melted it and ran a hundred toothpicks through the mess. Half his brain was in overdrive and the other half was him. It was incredible. It shouldn’t have been able to work. But somehow, he’d done exactly what Howard Stark and Janja Markovoskia had planned for him to do. Steve Rogers and the contents of the Providentia’s sphere were sharing the hard drive that was a human brain. Not easily. Not well. But they were both in there and intact. He hoped.

“Near gamma is starting to drop, finally.” The tech who’d been keeping a running log sounded almost as relieved as Bruce did himself. “We’re back under 200.”

Bruce wondered what that meant for Steve.

* * * * * * * * *

“How are you feeling, Mr. Stark?” Richardson asked. 

Tony felt like throwing up. He felt like throwing up and he was beyond exhausted and his head was pounding against the inside of the helmet and everything sounded like he was underwater. And he had no idea what was going on with Rogers. 

“Tony?” Pepper followed up. Her could barely hear her, either, but having the channel up loud enough to hear clearly just made his head want to split open. He was in no way new to radiation sickness, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. At least he was firing on all thrusters again. If he could stay conscious.

“What’s going on with Rogers?” he asked instead of answering. He’d had to turn off the HUD, too.

Pepper huffed in irritation, but it was Halburt who answered.

“Captain Rogers’s MRI shows good activity,” he allowed. Which told Tony nothing. “And the radiation level in the room is falling.”

Which was either good or bad, so again, it told him nothing. He made a decision. He already felt like crap—why not embrace it, right?

He sucked it up and turned on the HUD and tried not to hurl in his suit. Then he turned off the link to the observation room. 

“Hey Jarvis, remind me—what’s the radiation differential with my visor up?” he asked, striving for a blithe, but not too blithe, tone. The worst part of raising an AI to understand your personal vocal cues was that when it grew up, your AI tended to understand your personal vocal cues.

There was a pause that meant Jarvis wasn’t happy with him. 

“J?” he prompted softly.

“The radiation differential is point two five four nine eight, sir.” Snippy. “Meaning that nominal radiation exposure would not be reached until—” Too late for Tony’s tastes.

“Disable radiation lock when the ambient near gamma hits 45 rems.” You had to be firm with your kids, right? Wasn’t that what everyone said?

There was a very long pause. “Yes, sir,” Jarvis replied unwillingly.

So there was that done. He re-enabled the communications link.

Since he had the HUD searing his eyeballs anyway, Tony called up the fMRI feed. They’d hit perfect equilibrium, it looked like. Except that not all of Steve was where it needed to be. He and the AI were sharing his brain, but they were also sharing everything in it. The Sapience Project was about using the brain as a hard drive, not as a place to store two separate operating systems. He wasn’t sure how this was going to work.

And he was really going to throw up.

He looked down at Steve’s body on the gurney and activated his external speakers. Maybe Rogers couldn’t hear him, but if he could…?

“How goes the war, Cap?” he asked, not really expecting an answer. 

So he couldn't have been more surprised when he got one.

* * * * * * * * *

_ to be continued... _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry this is taking so long. My entire, very large, family is in town for the holiday and I'm having a hard time even getting to the computer. 
> 
> Don't worry. The end is near!


	12. Chapter 12

There was no time here, without the memories to help him gauge things, so Steve had no idea how long it took to move to the lab.

The sketch was pretty accurate, as Steve’s life sketches usually were. So it was weird, or maybe completely appropriate, to find Howard’s old cathode ray monitor on the desk where one of Tony’s most advanced computers had stood in real life.

The monitor was blank, though. Which didn’t help Steve at all. He hadn’t really spent a lot of time watching what Howard did when he dragged him into the lab to experiment. Howard typed on his keyboard and things happened. Tony’s computers were even more difficult to fathom. They were more like _magic_ sometimes than machinery.

Steve sighed, reaching out imaginary hands in his mind to tap the bulky keys. It took a long time before he successfully typed a word, but he figured Howard would have been proud of him.

**`HELLO` **

It was something, right? He wondered what response he’d get, if any. You could _talk_ to Tony’s computers, though Steve couldn’t really get the hang of talking right now, even in here.

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

No. Right?

**`NO` **

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

No.

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

Again and again. Well, this was just great.

He looked across the room at the computer that Tony and Dr. Banner had been using to hack into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s database. The very modern, very _not_ 1945 computer. He’d spent a lot of time trying to catch up to the twenty-first century, and he was getting there, but the closest he got to hacking things was using a search engine.

A pencil-line cursor blinked on the glass screen. Really?

Figuring it couldn’t hurt, Steve put his hands to the sleek and modern sketched keyboard on that desk and typed **`How do I get out?`** It seemed a little easier this time.

`Working…`

`Working…`

`Working…`

Steve hung his head for a moment. Why wasn’t anything ever easy?

“How goes the war, Cap?” Tony said, sounding just the same as he had when Hulk had screamed him awake after the Battle. Weak and sick, his voice made weaker still by the fact that it seemed to be coming through a speaker. Banner had said something about locking down the suit, hadn’t he?

The war was hell, right about now, but at least he could hear for himself that Stark was breathing. Didn’t sound so great, though, and Steve wondered what was happening out there. He tried to blink his eyes open, again, but still couldn’t manage it.

“Rogers?” Tony sounded shocked. “Steve, was that you twitching your eyes, or the little guy?”

What little guy?

Obviously, Steve had managed to move _something_ in the real world. Funny, now that he felt like he had a little more control, a little more room in his mind, he couldn’t seem to figure out how to communicate. He’d just done it on instinct before, but now he couldn’t even come up with the words.

Maybe Tony could understand him anyway. He looked at the computer screen again.

`Working…`

`Working…`

`Working…`

Tony was talking to someone else. “Yeah. Well, clearly they came to some sort of equilibrium, but it isn’t going to do us any good if he can’t wipe out the AI.”

Wipe out the AI. right. Steve tapped the ESC key on the keyboard and the computer gave him a blinking cursor again.

This was either a really good idea, or a _really_ bad idea.

**`Delete AI` **

He pressed enter and waited, not sure what would happen, but sure that something would.

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

“Oh, come on!” he griped, and the sound of his own voice startled him.

* * * * * * * * *

Tony watched as Steve’s brow wrinkled and his right hand twitched, like he was trying to curl it into a fist. Even his lips moved a little. Tony looked at the ambient radiation reading and cursed. 79 rems. Lower, but not low enough.

With a flick of his eye, Tony brought up the fMRI and stared at it a minute. “Wait. Halburt, what’s happening there?”

“Mr. Stark?”

“There’s something happening _there_ ,” Tony repeated, highlighting a flow of neurons that hadn’t been on the previous scans Tony had seen. He threw the image back to the monitors in the observation room.

“He’s imagining,” Halburt replied blandly.

“Excuse me?” God, he still couldn’t hear right. If this was permanent, it might be worse than the eye thing. Tony nudged the volume up, wary of his headache.

“Imaginary thought flows from the parietal to occipital lobes,” the neurologist explained. “Now that Captain Rogers has regained the use of that area of his brain, he’s also regained the function of imagination.”

That sounded very poetic and not what Tony would have expected from the grumpy doctor.

“Huh,” he mused, looking at Steve’s body. “Would be good if you could just imagine a kill switch for the AI.”

Wait…

“Tony?” Bruce got it. Bruce got it exactly.

“Do we have it?” Tony asked.

* * * * * * * * *

Steve had no idea what a kill switch was. Like a third-line radio relay, he’d very dimly heard someone explaining imagination to Tony, which made sense. In the theater, he’d been able to call up memories, and he’d traded images with Tony that seemed like they were Tony’s actual memories, too…

He looked around the lab, then out the window to the bridge, where he’d lightly sketched the rows of computers and the sky beyond. And now he could create this. Would be nice if he could just conjure up the AI and a boxing ring and go a few rounds. He looked around hopefully, but while the gym in DC did appear, the AI didn’t.

Dr. Banner’s voice came over what Steve could only assume was Tony’s radio. “There’s nothing in any of the files.”

“It has one. Dad never built anything he couldn’t destroy,” Tony replied.

It wasn’t untrue. Once, after Howard had purposely triggered a self-destruct on a weapon he’d been working on—one he’d seen too many exploitable flaws in—he’d smirked at Steve’s surprise. “Only thing I ever helped make that I couldn’t break was you, pal.”

“Look in the margins,” Tony continued, talking to Banner. “Might be a random word or series of numbers… Damn, he might not have even written it down in the same files.”

Steve went back to Howard’s computer and put his imaginary hands on the keyboard.

**`ABORT` **

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

“Okay,” Steve murmured, still a little put off by the sound of his voice in his mind. “Not that.”

**`DELETE` **

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO: `

“Random,” Steve muttered. “Random…”

**`BEER` **

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO:`

**`DANCING GIRLS` **

He waited for the inevitable “recalibrate device”. What he got instead was a searing pain, rising in his arms and chest and back, so sharp that he mentally held his breath against it.

“Something’s happening,” someone said, as Steve gritted his teeth and tried to ride out the crest of the pain. “Captain Rogers’s heart rate just spiked. Blood pressure is going up.”

* * * * * * * * *

“He’s in pain,” Richardson whispered.

Pepper looked away from the monitors. “What do you mean?”

“He could feel that now,” Halburt agreed. “When he was sequestered before, he wouldn’t have been able to feel anything from his physical body, but he’s regained most of what we read as the sensory areas of his brain.”

“And those agents weren’t gentle when they trussed him up,” Richardson grumbled. Pepper hadn’t been too happy with the way they slammed him around either, so she shared the sentiment.

“But why now?” Tony asked over the audio link. “Why not right _when_ he reconnected to it?”

“He’s right,” Halburt said. “Captain Rogers has had some control over that area for at least half an hour.”

“Perhaps it took him that long to really engage the sensory areas,” Richardson offered.

“Or maybe he pissed off the AI,” Tony grated. “Bruce? Any luck on finding Dad’s magic word?”

* * * * * * * * *

Magic word?

> _Steve waved his hand at the lab at large. “How did you get into… all of this?” he asked Howard, during another endless session with the helmet. “Nothing wrong with science, but all of this?”_
> 
> _Howard had smiled. “Favorite authors as a kid were H.G. Welles and Camile Flammarion.” He plugged a wire into a slot jerking back a little as it sparked like his wires usually did. “Hell, I always thought the most powerful word in the world was why.”_

Even in his imagination, the pain in his body made it hard to move. But he tried, lifting his arms and trying to get to the keyboard.

Which suddenly vanished, along with the rest of the lab.

* * * * * * * * *

“The AI just gave a surge—” Bruce started.

“I see it,” Tony replied, watching angrily as a large finger of the red that designated abnormal function poked into the parietal lobe. He looked over at Steve, whose body was definitely responding to _him_ right now, not the AI. His hands were both balled into fists where they were strapped to his sides, and his face was screwed up in pain. “He definitely pissed it off.”

Damn it, he needed to see what was happening!

“Jarvis, what are my rems?” he asked sharply. He’d shut off that depressing little meter when he was looking at the brain scans. It reappeared, still depressing.

“Near gamma ambient radiation is now at 70.3. Radiation is rising.”

“Rising?” Tony griped. “Why is it rising again?”

“The AI must be shedding it so he can’t use it,” Bruce replied. “He should easily be able to metabolize that much.”

“Would make it a hell of a lot easier to understand what was going on if he could.” Tony knew, he _knew_ , that if he overrode the radiation protocols now, he’d pretty much be finished. But he'd known he’d be dead if he grabbed that nuke. The difference here was, he had a choice. Not one he wanted to make, but a choice.

Maybe, when it came to the radiation, Steve did, too.

“Come on, Cap,” he said quietly, hoping Rogers was getting _something_ from the words. One of Steve’s memories came to him. “You’ve beat back the enemy before. It’s just like that facility in the Alps—”

* * * * * * * * *

“—Use their own weapons against them,” Steve said at the same time, feeling the fire running up and down his body, shaking in the mental space he was _still_ trapped in. “Great idea, Stark.” He looked around at the utter empty that used to be a lab. “How exactly do I do that?”

The Tesseract-built weapons? They’d been in the lower hold on the helicarrier. Try as he might, though, Steve couldn’t conjure them up in his imagination. He remembered exactly where they were…

And suddenly the memory was more like those dreams he had of things that had actually happened. He wasn’t watching himself as he jogged down to the lower levels, he was there. The pain was still with him, but it didn’t seem to stop him moving.

“Radiation is falling again,” the voice he didn’t recognize announced. “Now 68 rems.”

“There! You got it, Cap.” Tony sounded surprised that his idea had worked.

Steve opened the case, staring at the weapons in anger. Because he _was_ still angry. He just had another target. He grabbed the case and hauled it back upstairs, not quite sure what he was going to do when he got there. If the weird logic here worked the way he thought it did, he wasn’t sure he could do more than just go through the motions he’d gone through the last time.

“He’s gained back some ground,” Banner said quietly.

Which made Steve smile and try to imagine the lab again. It appeared, hand-sketched and neat, but both computers were gone. And the whispers were building.

“Damn it.” He felt a need to just curl into himself and give way to the pain, but he’d come this far, hadn’t he?

“Steve?” Stark was revving up. “I think he might actually be making headway. I swear he just tried to say something. Bruce, where are we with the kill switch?”

“Up a hill without a keyboard,” Steve murmured to himself. Stark didn’t seem to hear. Steve tried to draw Howard’s monitor, then Tony’s screen, but nothing more appeared. Just the tables and the walls, and the long dark window that should have looked out into the bridge…

Gritting his teeth and letting out a groan for the pain involved, Steve hefted one of the Tesseract weapons and pointed it at the big black space.

* * * * * * * * *

Steve’s groan was audible in the blank interrogation room, and Tony mentally jumped at the sound of it. Guy sounded worse than Tony felt. “Jarvis? Rem count?”

“52 and dropping, sir,” Jarvis replied. “Might I suggest, however—”

“No,” Tony shot back. Seven more points. Seven measly points and then he’d at least get some idea of what the hell was going on.

“Dr. Halburt?” The voice Tony had dubbed Radiation Man in his mind was full of portent and Tony really hated that. Like the setup in the horror film, before the good guy turned around and saw the monster you’d always known was coming for him. “There’s consolidation in the aberrant areas.”

Tony pulled the fMRI back up and cursed under his breath. The activity in the AI’s portions of Steve’s gray matter had muted, for the most part, allowing the majority of the energy to pool in his parietal lobe. Steve’s own electrical activity was there to meet it. Tony didn’t know what the junction of those two super-active areas in Steve’s mind looked like to the supersoldier, but they were clearly about to be ground zero in this fight.

* * * * * * * * *

His mind didn’t draw the breaking glass, but it did provide the sound effect as the barrier dissolved. The image beyond was ink drawing, bold and tight and clear, and Steve hopped through the opening and looked around for a target.

A ping went off on his left and he spun toward it, the Tesseract rifle coming to bear, though his hands shook with the pain of holding it. A single monitor was active among the rows of computers.

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO:`

“That again?”

“What again?” Tony replied dimly. So he must have said that out loud.

Moving toward the monitor was like hiking through waist-high snow, and the pain only got worse as he tried to get there. Ten feet short of his goal, an explosion went off, slamming him to the side and forcing a cry from his lips as he landed flat on his already-screaming back.

The next explosion felt like a direct hit, and Steve couldn’t even respond to it. Like being blown sideways by a mortar blast. He just lay there, stunned, and stared at the neatly inked ceiling as it started to erase itself.

_No. No way._

Steve had never backed down from a fight, never laid down when he had the strength to get up. Never. Damned if he was going to now. He rolled on his side and shoved himself to his feet.

* * * * * * * * *

The rem count went from red to yellow at the same moment Steve cried out, and Tony didn’t waste a second in opening his visor.

“Tony?” Bruce's query was drawn out in irritation. “What are you doing?”

Not listening to Banner, that was for sure. Tony was too busy looking at the bizarre cartoon—realistic and filled with the sounds of explosions that he could hear more clearly than he heard real sound right now—and the image of Steve in the middle of it, trying desperately to get to a computer before the scene erased itself. Steve spun around and fired high and behind, then used the moment to advance on a computer on the left side of the room. He had a finger on the keyboard before he was blown back again.

“Never would have figured you for a tech answer, Captain,” he muttered quietly, hoping he didn’t break Steve’s concentration.

“Tony, what is going on?” Pepper snapped. “Why did you put up your visor—”

“Pep—” he tried.

Steve stumbled hard, and his real-life body started panting slightly in pain, reminding Tony too much of the sphere in that field.

“I swear to God, Tony, if you don’t put that visor down right now—”

“Pepper, it’s—” he tried again.

“It’s not fine, Tony! It’s never fine! Put the damn visor _down_ .”

Tony didn’t exactly tune her out, but he did focus more on Steve than her.

The AI was trying to stop him getting to the monitor, but he’d committed now, and if there was one thing that a childhood full of Captain America stories and a battle for New York had taught Tony, it was that Steve Rogers always committed fully. It was just a question of whether he’d survive the battle he was fighting.

“Come on, Cap,” he whispered as Pepper stopped trying to get him to listen. He was the only sound in the room now, save for Steve’s pain-filled wheezing. “You know what to do, don’t you?” he asked, still barely speaking. “If you didn’t, the damn thing wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you.”

As Steve again got closer to the one active computer, though, the scene got dimmer.

“Ambient radiation now at 28 rems,” Jarvis said, loud in the stillness. “Radiation differential now within allowable limits.”

Tony didn’t acknowledge him. He just retracted the rest of the helmet. But the drop in radiation was closing his window on what was going on, and the whole scene faded out just as Steve was blown sideways by yet another blast. He’d been an arm’s length from the damn keyboard.

“Radiation at 10 rems,” Radiation Guy announced. “Falling fast.”

“Great,” Richardson replied. “I need two medical teams. Let’s move this gurney and be ready.” His voice was suddenly louder, though Tony was starting to float away from it. He was tired. Like… shawarma tired. “Mr. Stark? We’ll have you out in just a few minutes.”

That’d be good, Tony thought. But what about Steve?

Which was when the alarm went off. The flatline sound of it echoed in the utter silence, as Rogers stopped breathing.

* * * * * * * * *

Steve spun around, firing at the windows on the upper wall—where Maria Hill had said Barton had been shooting from. It gave him a brief second, and he used it to rush the computer. But his enemy got to it first, and Steve felt the pain rip through him as he flew sideways into the bulkhead.

Damn it.

“Never would have figured you for a tech answer, Captain.” Tony’s comment was nearly silent, but Steve heard it. More sounds from the real world followed, but they were mostly swallowed by the background hiss of the sphere calling him and the upfront volleys of pain.

He hit the ground hard and got back up. He _was_ getting out of here.

The sketchbook bridge was shrinking to himself and the computer and the attacks, and Steve shoved forward again, trying to lay a hand on that keyboard.

“Come on, Cap.” Tony’s voice was almost a match for the sphere’s whispers. “You know what to do, don’t you? If you didn’t, the damn thing wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you.”

Which was comforting, he supposed. He just had to live long enough to make it there. He ground his teeth as he was slammed away from his target again, and he brought up the weapon still in his hand, his aim off. Instead of the source of the latest hit, the blast impacted on the computer and everything around him… just stopped.

No whispers. No explosions. Nothing.

`ERROR. RECALIBRATE DEVICE? YES NO:`

Steve nearly sobbed, and dragged himself up to stand before the monitor. God, he’d better be right about this.

**`WHY?` **

The monitor went black, and Steve felt like he was being crushed under the entire weight of the real helicarrier, somewhere beyond the walls of his mind. As his vision started to go black as well, he saw one last message that followed him into nothingness.

`EXECUTE`

* * * * * * * * *

Tony hated hospitals. When you woke up in a hospital, there was this smell. It wasn’t the antiseptic smell novels were always talking about. It was just flat. Dead. And the whole world was a collection of hushed whispers.

“Tony?”

Like that. Pepper should have been completely clear and normal sounding, but it was a hospital, so… She was on mute.

“Tony, are you awake this time, or are you just going to mumble and go back to sleep?”

She sounded tired. But happy. Or okay, at least. Why was he in a hospital again? That was the other thing. When he woke up at home, or on the road, or anywhere that wasn’t a hospital, he just woke up. In a hospital, the whispers and the smell made it hard to figure things out for a minute.

_“When I look at it, I hear whispers.”_

The memory of Steve Rogers’s words snapped his eyes open, and Tony looked up at Pepper, seated beside him and looking more worried than her voice had hinted at.

“He’s alive,” she said quickly, because she was Pepper, and Tony didn’t have to have a radiation-fueled mindmeld with her for her to know what he was thinking. “Steve’s alive.”

“Alive” didn’t tell him much, though. He tried to find the remote that let you put the head of the bed up—another stupid thing about hospitals. So badly designed! Pepper found it first, of course, and propped him up. Which made him want to puke, but not as much as he had when he was in the interrogation room. He looked around and grinned faintly when he saw that his monitor was still set up beside the bed, though the wall screen had been put away.

Steve’s fMRI was there, and Tony stared at it for a long time before he turned back to Pepper.

“Is he awake?” he asked, clarifying quickly. “Normal Captain America awake, not _Klaatu barada nikto_ awake.”

“Not yet,” she answered, rolling her eyes at the joke. “Halburt isn’t sure what damage was done, long term.” She glared a little. “To him _or_ to you.”

Actually, Tony didn’t feel too horrible, all in all. Sure his head was pounding, now he was sitting up, and there was the lovely nausea, and his ears were still not working quite right. But he’d had worse.

Which was sort of pitiful, now he thought about it.

“What does Halburt say about that?” he asked, willing his hand not to shake as he pointed at the large area that had once been “lit up like Midtown” and had been dubbed the aberrant area. It looked faded to him, but Tony admitted that brains weren’t his area of expertise.

“He’s not sure." Bruce's voice came from the corner, where he working on his own computer. "It looks like the transfer can't hold. Steve's mind is _too_ adaptable. It's rewriting the repository.”

"Now that it doesn't have the AI keeping it stable." He should take Bruce to task for staying, but he didn't have the energy. He gave him a glare and called it good. "Poor Dad," he said instead. "Hoist on his own petard. Never create something more adaptable than you."

"It was a good experiment," Bruce allowed, which said a lot about how Bruce had ended up with Big Guy in his brain, if that was his definition. "The matrix would just need to be less like a computer and more like..."

"Jarvis?" Tony supplied. No, if you were going to put something in a human mind, it had to work like a human mind. As amazing and useful as Jarvis was, he was a computer construct. Maybe he and Bruce could come up with something, though. "Or maybe you don't put things like that in people's heads in the first place," he counseled. 

Pepper gave him a sort of pot-calling-the-kettle-black look at the sage advice. But she wasn't too mad at him anymore, so that was something.

"I'm hungry," he said suddenly, realizing he actually was. A little nauseated still, but hungry.

"You should be," Pepper told him. Okay, so she was still a little angry. She headed to the table across the room, where some food had apparently been set up while they waited. "You've been asleep for twenty hours."

That explained why he didn’t feel as sick as he had when Steve had stopped breathing. When Steve had died. Really died. Huh.

“Something else we have in common, I guess,” he murmured.

“What?” Pepper asked, coming back to her seat with a cup of something or other for herself and a plate of crackers for, hopefully, him.

“Nothing,” he replied swiping one of the crackers. “So, when do I get to get out of here?”

* * * * * * * * *

Steve woke to silence, and pain, and for a foggy minute he was afraid to open his eyes and find he was still in the ice somewhere north of anywhere, waking again to a frozen hell.

He snorted to himself at that as his mind cleared and he remembered. He supposed it was some sort of battle fatigue. They called it PTSD now. He remembered waking in the night as a young child and finding his dad sitting in the dark in the living room, sucking in air with even more difficulty than he usually did. When he was older, his mom told him his father had nightmares from the war. He’d wake in terror, trying to remember how to breathe after dreams of mustard gas floating across the fields like ghosts.

He wondered what his own dreams were going to look like now, after reliving so much he'd tried to put behind him.

“Hey Cap, you in there?”

Tony’s voice brought a surprising smile to Steve’s face and he chanced opening his eyes. He was in a hospital room, and he hurt. But not as much as he remembered hurting in that ink-drawn helicarrier. Stark was sitting in a chair next to the bed and the sun was setting through the windows that looked out on Washington DC. They must have brought him back to S.H.I.E.L.D. That was where he always seemed to end up anyway.

Steve thought over everything that had happened. His hands and feet were tied again, and the bindings on his wrists hurt like hell up against his bandaged arms. There was an IV, but he knew from experience that painkillers went right through him. There was nothing for it but to wait until it all healed. Which of course, it always did. Eventually.

It took him a long minute to notice that Stark was staring at him.

“What?” Steve asked.

Whatever Stark saw, he sat back and every muscle in his body seemed to relax. “Just making sure you’re you.”

Steve blinked at that. He’d get the story at some point. Right now, all he wanted was to go back to sleep. “And am I?”

Stark shrugged. “I don’t know. Have any mad plans for world domination? Revolution? Choking the living daylights out of someone?”

Steve stared at the bruises on Stark’s neck that were already half healed and wondered how long he’d been asleep this time. He didn’t bother to apologize. He hadn’t asked that of Barton, and he knew somehow that Stark wouldn’t ask it of him.

Didn’t make him any less sorry, though.

“Not sure about the last one yet,” he deadpanned, glad to see the grin on Stark’s face. Tony's face.

Half healed or not, Tony wasn’t his usual fluid self as he rose and started undoing the restraints.

“Well I guess we can’t have everything, can we?” Tony settled himself back in the chair and suddenly looked awkward in his attempt to look nonchalant.

Or maybe it was just that Steve had learned a thing or two about him. Not that Stark was going to want to acknowledge that, of course.

“Hey Tony,” he said quietly, his eyes already starting to droop again. God, he was tired.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.” Steve forced his eyes wide to catch the response.

Tony grinned a thankful, satisfied smile. “You are welcome. For what little I did.” He waved a hand. “Now go to sleep. I’m taking Pepper to dinner.”

Steve let his eyes close. “Thought she was angry with you?” he murmured, remembering the panic and hurt in Pepper’s voice over Tony’s radio.

“Nah,” Tony refuted.

Steve opened one eye and fixed it on him.

“Okay, yeah. A little—but that’s why I’m taking her to dinner. As an apology.” He sighed. “Anyway, she’ll forgive me. Helping save a friend’s life covers a multitude of sins.”

Steve smiled sleepily at the sentiment, and the word choice.

Good thing Tony was good at saving his friends, because God knew he did, indeed, have a multitude of sins.

* * * * * * * * *

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know, they didn't talk. They're Tony and Steve. They don't talk. (Think Rhodey and Tony in IM2, and you'll get it.)
> 
> Also, I know Tony should be dead or glowing by now. In my mind, his daughter should have three heads and be able to manipulate metal with her mind. He has had so much canonical radiation exposure that really, what's a little more, right? Anyway, if you want my take on why he is still alive, read [Five Times Tony Stark Almost Died](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2407601/chapters/5324642).


End file.
